High-performance membrane chromatography of small molecules

High-performance membrane chromatography (HPMC) proved to be a very efficie nt method for fast protein separations. Recently, it was shown to be applic able also for the isocratic chromatography of plasmid DNA conformations. Ho wever, no study about the separation of small molecules has been performed until now. In this work, we investigated the possibility of gradient and is ocratic HPMC of small molecules with Convective Interaction Media disks of different chemistries and tried to explain the mechanism that enables their separation. We demonstrated that it is possible to achieve efficient separ ations of oligonucleotides and peptides in the ion-exchange mode as well as the separation of small hydrophobic molecules in the reversed-phase mode. It was shown that similar peak resolution can be provided in both gradient and isocratic modes.