Chromatographic elution displacement

Also, the mechanism of separation based on displacement chromatography followed by enrichment in a CCC column was studied, and a tenfold enrichment of the transition metal ions was observed in the stationary phase. However, diffusion of the sample is an inherent process in chromatographic elution spreading of the sample bands in the column is unavoidable in CCC as it is in conventional LC. 

Tiselius [3] defined three distinct modes in which a chromatographic column can be operated, elution, displacement and frontal. In addition to this there are ways of operating chromatographic columns which can be considered as intermediate between these modes and, in addition, there are various techniques which have been applied to chromatographic separations in order to improve throughput. These will be discussed in this Section. 

Development of the Chromatogram. The term development describes the process of performing a chromatographic separation. There are several ways in which separation may be made to occur, eg, frontal, displacement, and elution chromatography. Frontal chromatography uses a large quantity of sample and is usually unsuited to analytical procedures. In displacement and elution chromatography, much smaller amounts of material are used. 

Isolation procedures for many biochemicals are based on chromatography. Practically any substance can be selected from a crude mixture and eluted at relatively high purity from a chromatographic column with the right combination of adsorbent, conditions, and eluant. For bench scale or for a small pilot plant, such chromatography has rendered alternate procedures such as electrophoresis nearly obsolete. Unfortunately, as size increases, dispersion in the column ruins resolution. To produce small amounts or up to tens of kilograms per year, chromatography is an excellent choice. When the scale-up problem is solved, these procedures should displace some of the conventional steps in the chemical process industries. 

Conventional elution chromatography has the serious disadvantage of dilution, and usually a concentration step must follow. The technique of displacement chromatography circumvents dilution and may even result in an eluant more concentrated than the feed. A displacer compound breaks the desired product from the chromatographic material sharply, and a column heavily loaded with several biochemicals will release them one at a time depending on their adsorption equilibria. However, the displacers tena to be expensive and can be troublesome to remove from the product. 

A chromatographic separation can be developed in three ways, by displacement development, by frontal analysis, and by elution development, the last being almost universally used in all analytical chromatography. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, and because in preparative chromatography (under certain conditions of mass overload) displacement effects occur to varying extents, all three development processes will be described. 

This type of chromatographic development will only be briefly described as it is rarely used and probably is of academic interest only. This method of development can only be effectively employed in a column distribution system. The sample is fed continuously onto the column, usually as a dilute solution in the mobile phase. This is in contrast to displacement development and elution development, where discrete samples are placed on the system and the separation is subsequently processed. Frontal analysis only separates part of the first compound in a relatively pure state, each subsequent component being mixed with those previously eluted. Consider a three component mixture, containing solutes (A), (B) and (C) as a dilute solution in the mobile phase that is fed continuously onto a column. The first component to elute, (A), will be that solute held least strongly in the stationary phase. Then the... 

In the pneumatic pumping system, the pressure (and not the flow rate) is maintained constant as variations in chromatographic conditions occur. Thus, a change in mobile phase viscosity (e.g. gradient elution) or column back pressure will result in a change in flow rate for these types of pumps. The gas displacement pump in which a solvent is delivered to the column by gas pressure is an example of such a pneumatic pump. The gas displacement system is among the least expensive pumps available and is found in several low cost instruments. While the pump is nonpulsating and hence, produces low noise levels with the detectors in current use, its flow stability and reproducibility are only adequate. In addition, its upper pressure limit is only 2000 psi which may be too low in certain applications. 

Consequences of the Snyder and Soczewinski model are manifold, and their praetieal importance is very signifieant. The most speetaeular conclusions of this model are (1) a possibility to quantify adsorbents ehromatographic activity and (2) a possibility to dehne and quantify chromatographic polarity of solvents (known as the solvents elution strength). These two conclusions could only be drawn on the assumption as to the displacement mechanism of solute retention. An obvious necessity was to quantify the effect of displacement, which resulted in the following relationship for the thermodynamic equilibrium constant of adsorption, K,, in the case of an active chromatographic adsorbent and of the monocomponent eluent ... 

In its simplest form the competition model assumes the entire adsorbent surface is covered by a monolayer of solute and mobile phase molecules. Under normal chromatographic conditions, the concentration of sample molecules will be small and the adsorbed monolayer will consist mainly of mobile phase molecules. Retention of a solute molecule occurs by displacing a roughly equivalent volume of mobile phase molecules from the monolayer to make the surface accessible to the adsorbed solute aiolecule. For elution of the solute to occur -the above process must be reversible, and can be represented by the equilibrium depicted by equation (4.6)... 

Although separations may be caused by elution, frontal and displacement analyses, yet the elution technique is the most common. This method makes use of a stream of carrier-gas flowing through the column. Precisely, a sample is injected into the carrier-gas as a plug of vapour that is swept into the head of the packed chromatographic column. Separation of components that comprise the sample results from a difference in the multiple forces by which the column materials tend to retain each of the components. 

Chromatographic separation of these mixtures in the elution mode is incapable of resolving many thousands of peptides present in these mixtures, even when orthogonal, two-dimensional separations are performed. The investigator is left with little option for low-abundance peptide iden-tihcation other than affinity approaches that target certain subclasses (e.g., phosphopeptides). While effective for certain applications, the latter allow for enrichment of only a small subset of low-abundance peptides. Because of its potential for broad applicability to the problem of low-abundance peptide enrichment, displacement chromatography remains a technique that offers great possibilities in this area. 

Some mention should be made concerning the state of the polymer at the beginning of TLC experiment. Normally the sample is applied to the plate from solution in a relatively nonpolar solvent. This solvent is then evaporated, and the chromatographic plate is eluted with the chosen eluent. The drying step results in a polymer deposit which would be difficult to characterize it is not simply a precipitate, and it probably is not a simple adsorbed (multi) layer. Redissolution and entry into the mobile phase under displacement conditions occur in a minute or less (13). 

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