Microscopic Probing of Silica Surfaces

特拉华州大学的玛丽沃思教授在分析和表面化学项目的支持下，利用单分子光谱学和原子力显微镜（AFM）的组合技术来探测分离技术核心材料的吸附过程和动力学。特别是，研究集中在肽的吸附作为研究蛋白质吸附的先决条件。 探针染料分子DiI用于光谱报告硅胶上吸附位点的物理和化学性质。 AFM用于测量纳米级粗糙度，并将粗糙度和化学吸附之间的可能联系联系起来。 这项工作解决了为什么地形促进活性硅烷醇。 它还解决了平滑是否可以减少活性硅烷醇足以影响肽和蛋白质分离。 现代液相色谱是每年约20亿美元的全球产业，并且对制药、生物技术和许多其他产业至关重要。 开发用于肽和蛋白质分离的有效且可靠的技术是蛋白质组学的基本兴趣，并且在这个意义上，对于疾病的诊断和治疗的进一步发展。 仍然存在未解决的问题，其中最大的问题之一是由于用于分离混合物中的化合物的二氧化硅相上的残留硅烷醇导致的不期望的分辨率损失。 这项工作试图解释有关残留硅烷醇的基本问题，最终使改进的分离。

Professor Mary Wirth of the University of Delaware is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to utilize the combined techniques of single molecule spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy (AFM) to probe adsorption processes and kinetics of materials central to separation technology. In particular, studies focus on the adsorption of peptides as a prerequisite for studying protein adsorption. The probe dye molecule DiI is used to spectroscopically report on the physical and chemical nature of adsorption sites on silica gel. AFM is used to measure nanoscale roughness and to relate possible connections between roughness and chemical adsorption. The work addresses why topography promotes active silanols. It also addresses whether smoothing can reduce active silanols sufficiently to impact peptide and protein separations. Modern liquid chromatography is approximately a two billion dollar per year worldwide industry, and is crucial to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and many other industries. Developing efficient and reliable techniques for peptide and protein separation is of basic interest for proteomics, and in this sense, for further developments in diagnosis and treatment of disease. There remain unresolved issues, with one of the most problematic being the undesirable loss of resolution due to residual silanols on the silica phases used to separate compounds in mixtures. This work attempts to explain the fundamental issues about the residual silanols, eventually enabling improved separations.