Reverse phases

The resulting oligonucleotide is often of surprising purity as judged by analytic HPLC or electrophoresis, and up to 30 mg of a deoxyeicosanucleotide (20-base DNA) can be routinely obtained. Nevertheless small amounts of short sequences, resulting from capping and from base-catalysed hydrolysis, must always be removed by quick gel filtration, repeated ethanol precipitation from water (desalting), reverse-phase HPLC, gel electrophoresis, and other standard methods. 

In reverse-phase chromatography, which is the more commonly encountered form of HPLC, the stationary phase is nonpolar and the mobile phase is polar. The most common nonpolar stationary phases use an organochlorosilane for which the R group is an -octyl (Cg) or -octyldecyl (Cig) hydrocarbon chain. Most reverse-phase separations are carried out using a buffered aqueous solution as a polar mobile phase. Because the silica substrate is subject to hydrolysis in basic solutions, the pH of the mobile phase must be less than 7.5. 

A reverse-phase HPLC separation is carried out using a mobile-phase mixture of 60% v/v water and 40% v/v methanol. What is the mobile phase s polarity index ... 

A useful guide when using the polarity index is that a change in its value of 2 units corresponds to an approximate tenfold change in a solute s capacity factor. Thus, if k is 22 for the reverse-phase separation of a solute when using a mobile phase of water (P = 10.2), then switching to a 60 40 water-methanol mobile phase (P = 8.2) will decrease k to approximately 2.2. Note that the capacity factor decreases because we are switching from a more polar to a less polar mobile phase in a reverse-phase separation. 

Solvent triangle for optimizing reverse-phase HPLC separations. Binary and ternary mixtures contain equal volumes of each of the aqueous mobile phases making up the vertices of the triangle. 

Haddad and associates report the following capacity factors for the reverse-phase separation of salicylamide (k i) and caffeine... 

Bohman and colleagues described a reverse-phase HPLC method for the quantitative analysis of vitamin A in food using the method of standard additions. In a typical example, a 10.067-g sample of cereal is placed in a 250-mL Erlenmeyer flask along with 1 g of sodium ascorbate,... 

Reversed-phase columns are used to separate polar substances. Although in LC the stationary phase is a solid, it is necessary to bear in mind that there may be a thin film of liquid (e.g water) held on its surface, and this film will modify the behavior of sample components equilibrating between the mobile and stationary phases. A textbook on LC should be consulted for deeper discussion on such aspects. 

Reversed-phase chromatography is widely used as an analytical tool for protein chromatography, but it is not as commonly found on a process scale for protein purification because the solvents which make up the mobile phase, ie, acetonitrile, isopropanol, methanol, and ethanol, reversibly or irreversibly denature proteins. Hydrophobic interaction chromatography appears to be the least common process chromatography tool, possibly owing to the relatively high costs of the salts used to make up the mobile phases. 

Reversed-phase high performance Hquid chromatography has come into use for estimating the purity of proteins and peptides as weU. However, before employed, a high performance Hquid chromatographic (hplc) profile of a given protein must be completely vaHdated (43). 

Fig. 12. Tryptic map of it-PA (mol wt = 66,000) showing peptides formed from hydrolysis of reduced, alkylated rt-PA. Separation by reversed-phase octadecyl (C g) column using aqueous acetonitrile with an added acidic agent to the mobile phase. Arrows show the difference between A, normal, and B, mutant rt-PA where the glutamic acid residue, D, has replaced the normal arginine residue, C, at position 275.

This reversed-phase chromatography method was successfully used in a production-scale system to purify recombinant insulin. The insulin purified by reversed-phase chromatography has a biological potency equal to that obtained from a conventional system employing ion-exchange and size-exclusion chromatographies (14). The reversed-phase separation was, however, followed by a size-exclusion step to remove the acetonitrile eluent from the final product (12,14). 

Whereas recombinant proteins produced as inclusion bodies in bacterial fermentations may be amenable to reversed-phase chromatography (42), the use of reversed-phase process chromatography does not appear to be widespread for higher molecular weight proteins. 

Another example is the purification of a P-lactam antibiotic, where process-scale reversed-phase separations began to be used around 1983 when suitable, high pressure process-scale equipment became available. A reversed-phase microparticulate (55—105 p.m particle size) C g siUca column, with a mobile phase of aqueous methanol having 0.1 Af ammonium phosphate at pH 5.3, was able to fractionate out impurities not readily removed by hquid—hquid extraction (37). Optimization of the separation resulted in recovery of product at 93% purity and 95% yield. This type of separation differs markedly from protein purification in feed concentration ( i 50 200 g/L for cefonicid vs 1 to 10 g/L for protein), molecular weight of impurities (<5000 compared to 10,000—100,000 for proteins), and throughputs ( i l-2 mg/(g stationary phasemin) compared to 0.01—0.1 mg/(gmin) for proteins). 

---