From Peptide Fractions to Pure, Dry Powders: Development of a Novel Automated Chromatographic Purification Process Supported by Solid-Phase Trapping

There are many commercially available instruments that can be used to process preparative liquid chromatography (LC) fractions, recovering the pure compound of interest and discarding background from the mobile phase.Some of these technologies utilize solid-phase trapping media to retain the compounds of interest while allowing the water, organic solvents and salt additives to be flushed to waste. Nearly two years ago, Shimadzu introduced a new instrument that leveraged this concept of solid-phase trapping and implemented a trapping column packed with a generically applicable resin that was appropriate for the retention of most small organic molecules. In addition to removing the mobile phase matrix background from the LC fraction, this instrument provided a mechanism to treat the retained compound on-column and recover it in a specific salt form as a highly pure and very dry powder, achieving better quality than traditional fraction dry-down techniques in significantly less time.