Click chemistry was applied to immobilize three kinds of alkyne-carboxylic acids onto azide-modified silica gel to prepare three novel stationary phases for weak cation exchange chromatography（WCX）.The developed protocol combines the benefits of operational simplicity,exceptionally mild conditions and high surface loadings.Six kinds of standard proteins were separated completely on the novel packings.Compared with commercial WCX columns,the three kinds of novel WCX packings prepared by click chemistry approach have better resolution and selectivity.Lysozyme was purified successfully from egg white with the novel WCX column by one step.The purity was more than 97%and a high specific activity was achieved to be 81,435 U/mg.The results illustrate the potential of click chemistry for preparation of stationary phase for IEC.
The refolding of the reduced/denatured insulin from bovine pancreas as the model protein was investigated with weak anion exchange chromatography （WAX） coupled with MALDI-TOF MS. The results indicated that the disulfide bonds almost cannot be formed correctly with the common mobile phase by WAX. However, with the urea gradient elution and in the presence of GSSG/ Cyst as the ratio 1：6 in the mobile phase employed, the disulfide exchange of reduced/denatured insulin can be accelerated resulting in forming the correct three disulfide bonds. The protein refolding efficiency of reduced/denatured insulin can be increased from 3 % to 34%. The effects of urea gradient and the oxidant and reductant groups, such as GSSG/GSH, Cyst, and GSSG/Cyst, on the forming the disulfide bonds of reduced/denatured insulin were investigated in detail. The results were further tested by the separation of the WAX fraction of reduced/denatured insulin with RPLC and MALDI-TOF MS.
Ionic liquids（ILs） immobilized on silica as novel high performance liquid chromatography（HPLC）stationary phases have attracted considerable attention. However, it has not been applied to protein separation. In this paper, N-methylimidazolium IL-modified silica-based stationary phase（Silpr Mim）was prepared and investigated as a novel multi-interaction stationary phase charged positively for protein separation. The results indicate that all of the basic proteins tested cannot be absorbed on this novel stationary phase, whereas all of the acidic proteins tested can be retained, and the baseline separation of eight kinds of acidic protein standards can be achieved when performed in reversed phase/ion-exchange chromatography（RPLC/IEC） mode. Compared with commonly used commercial octadecylated silica（ODS） column, the novel stationary phase can show selectivity and good resolution to acidic proteins, which has a promising application in the separation and analyses of acidic proteins from the complex samples in proteomics. In addition, the chromatographic behavior of proteins, the effect of the ligand structure and the retention mechanism on this stationary phase were also investigated.
Yi-Xin WangKai-Lou ZhaoFan YangLei TianYing YangQuan Bai
