A Queous Exclusion Chromatography

Abstract

The exclusion chromatography of water-soluble polymers has been a field of intense activity in recent years. Although polysaccharide gels like Agarose and Sephadex have long been used for the size separation of proteins (“gel filtration”), only the advent of new hydrophilic column packings could lead to the widespread application of aqueous GPC to syllthetic polymers. These new substrates are produced with the mechanical strength and the uniformity and control of both particle- and pore-size distributions requisite to the packing of high-efficiency columns. Such columns offer good separation of species of different molecular weight (MW) along with minimal band-spreading, and so car? provide, in principle, detailed and accurate MW distribution data coupled with short analysis times. MWD accuracy and assay speed - relatively unimportant in most bio-chemical research laboratories - are paramount considerations in the industrial laboratory involved with synthetic water-soluble polymers.