Rapid peptide separation by supercritical fluid chromatography.

BACKGROUND Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is continually gaining attention in the separation sciences as demand increases for higher throughput isolations and purifications. The higher flow rates associated with SFC provide a significant decrease in analysis time and increase in sample-throughput efficiency. Peptides are of particular interest for SFC due, in part, to the rather extensive analysis time required by HPLC. RESULTS This work explored a wide range of peptides not only for detection, but also for separation using SFC. A separation of five peptides ranging in molecular weights from 238.2 to 1046.2 was achieved by SFC in less than 12 min, compared with 50 min using HPLC. CONCLUSION This research further illustrates the ever-expanding applicability of SFC to a wider variety of compound classes. The rapid analysis time associated with SFC, as seen in this work, provides a nearly fivefold decrease in analysis time when compared with HPLC.