Separation and Characterization of Synthetic Polyelectrolytes and Polysaccharides with Capillary Electrophoresis

Abstract

The development of macromolecular engineering and the need for renewable and sustainable polymer sources make polymeric materials progressively more sophisticated but also increasingly complex to characterize. Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC or GPC) has a monopoly in the separation and characterization of polymers, but it faces a number of proven, though regularly ignored, limitations for the characterization of a number of complex samples such as polyelectrolytes and polysaccharides. Free solution capillary electrophoresis (CE), or capillary zone electrophoresis, allows usually more robust separations than SEC due to the absence of a stationary phase. It is, for example, not necessary to filter the samples for analysis with CE. CE is mostly limited to polymers that are charged or can be charged, but in the case of polyelectrolytes it has similarities with liquid chromatography in the critical conditions: it does not separate a charged homopolymer by molar mass. It can thus characterize the topology of a branched polymer, such as poly(acrylic acid), or the purity or composition of copolymers, either natural ones such as pectin, chitosan, and gellan gum or synthetic ones.

Capillary Electrophoresis to Monitor Peptide Grafting onto Chitosan Films in Real Time

“…Further, the analysis of sugars in breakfast cereals involved injecting samples with particles of breakfast cereal samples precipitated in water 8 . This also extends to the analysis of branched polyelectrolytes or copolymers 12,13 . Extensive work has also been completed in the development of CE techniques specifically for the analysis of proteins for proteomics 14 , chiral separation of natural or synthetic peptides 15 and microchip separations of proteins and peptides 16 .…”

Mechanistic insights into the formation of polyion complex aggregates from cationic thermoresponsive diblock copolymers

“…Mn,PEO [b] (g•mol -1 ) (Ð) Capillary electrophoresis in the critical conditions (CE-CC) is being developed to characterize complex polyelectrolytes [30] . It has allowed the successful quantification of homopolymers in cationic statistical copolymers [31] and in block copolymers [32] including PAPTAC-b-PNIPAM.…”

Probing Polyester Branching by Hybrid Trapped Ion-Mobility Spectrometry–Tandem Mass Spectrometry

“… 12 , 26 , 27 CE can be employed to separate linear from branched chains in concordance with their electrophoretic mobility as they differ in V H and thus charge-to-size/shape ratio. 18 , 28 However, CE evidently only applies to charged polymers. 14 NMR is the only technique capable of determining the average DB quantitatively as shown for poly(acrylic acid) 29 and poly(alkyl acid).…”