Cholesterol-based polymeric monolithic columns for capillary liquid chromatography. Part II

High performance affinity chromatography and related separation methods for the analysis of biological and pharmaceutical agents

The last few decades have witnessed the development of many high-performance separation methods that use biologically related binding agents. The combination of HPLC with these binding agents results in a technique known as high performance affinity chromatography (HPAC). This review will discuss the general principles of HPAC and related techniques, with an emphasis on their use for the analysis of biological compounds and pharmaceutical agents. Various types of binding agents for these methods will be considered, including antibodies, immunoglobulin-binding proteins, aptamers, enzymes, lectins, transport proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. Formats that will be discussed for these methods range from the direct detection of an analyte to indirect detection based on chromatographic immunoassays, as well as schemes based on analyte extraction or depletion, post-column detection, and multi-column systems. The use of biological agents in HPLC for chiral separations will also be considered, along with the use of HPAC as a tool to screen or study biological interactions. Various examples will be presented to illustrate these approaches and their applications in fields such as biochemistry, clinical chemistry, and pharmaceutical research.

Retention of small molecules on polymethacrylate monolithic capillary columns

In this paper, the concentration of N-isopropylacrylamide in the polymerization mixture has been varied to prepare several polymethacrylate monolithic capillary columns. Polymer monoliths combining N-isopropylacrylamide with zwitterion monomer, as well as various dimethacrylate crosslinking monomers have been prepared and characterized. Uracil, thiourea, phenol, toluene, ethylbenzene, propylbenzene, and butylbenzene have been used to characterize retention of prepared capillary columns in the mobile phases with 40-95% of acetonitrile and at working temperatures ranging from 25 to 60°C. By an optimization of six-parameter polynomial models we have found that the retention of small molecules is affected mainly by the concentration of the acetonitrile in the mobile phase with very low contribution of working temperature and combined effect of acetonitrile concentration and temperature. Concentration of the mobile phase controlled also enthalpy of the retention. On the other hand, entropic contribution was almost insensitive to the change of the mobile phase composition, especially for mobile phases containing more than 60% of acetonitrile.