Affinity chromatography solid supports development

One of the most important factors in the area of affinity chromatography is the development of solid supports. A correct choice of a solid support and the covalent coupling between the matrix and the affinity ligand may be essential for the success of the desired separation. A solid support may even constitute an affinity ligand itself, for example, polysaccharides for some lectins [63]. 

The compatibility of all these PEG-based resins with aqueous buffers allows their use for biochemical applications such as on-resin screening of chemical libraries and in the development of affinity chromatography [58-61]. All these families of PEG-based resins, except POEPS, are free of aromatic rings. This feature makes these solid supports highly suitable for a broad range of applications where such rings can react with reagents or/and jeopardize the solid-phase NMR control of the reactions [62]. 

High-performance affinity chromatography has recently been reported with trypsin-modified avidin supported on 5 pm silica. While the separations were successful and a wide range of foods were studied, elution times were 80 minutes and ADAM post-column reactions were still required (Hayakawa et al. 2009). However, such affinity columns within a solid-phase extraction (SPE) platform make realistic choices for sample preparation, whereby the biotin can be purified and concentrated prior to reversed-phase HPLC. R-Biopharm has recently developed a commercially available antibody-based immunoaffinity column to bind biotin from aqueous extracts, providing an excellent technique to clean up complex samples. 

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