Research Initiation Awards: Enhanced Micellar Electrokinetic Capillary Chromatography for Bioseparations

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Micellar Electrokinetic Capillary Chromatography (MECC) is one of the operational modes of High Performance Capillary Electrophoresis (HPCE) specifically designed for the separation of neutral compounds or mixtures of neutral and charged compounds. Neutral compounds are separated based on their differential partitioning between the aqueous phase and the hydrophobic interior of the micellar phase. MECC combines the strengths of capillary electrophoresis with its high separation efficiency and liquid chromatography with its resolving power of neutral compounds. MECC is an important new separation method for biological, biochemical, and pharmaceutical applications. A fundamental problem in MECC is its limited retention window. This obstacle limits the separation resolution and the number of components capable of being separated by MECC. An easy way for increasing the range of the retention window involves the direct control of electroosmosis. The use of an additional electric field applied from outside of the capillary for directly and dynamically controlling electroosmosis is proposed. The fundamentals of this approach are studied experimentally and theoretically with a proposed capacitor model. The separation resolution of amino acids as model systems are tested and compared to that of previous methods.