Size Exclusion Chromatography / Gel Permeation Chromatography: An Introduction in 30 Minutes

Size Exclusion Chromatography / Gel Permeation Chromatography: An Introduction in 30 Minutes

GPC/SEC is mainly used for the characterization of macromolecules including synthetic and natural polymers (including polysaccharides) as well as proteins or RNA/DNA. This white paper provides an introduction to the technique in 30 minutes.

Executive Summary 

The bulk physical properties, such as strength and toughness, of materials like synthetic and natural polymers, or the activity and efficacy of proteins and biopharmaceuticals are strongly dependent on their molecular properties. In a large number of industries, there is a clear and strong desire to control molecular properties such as molecular weight and structure in order to better manipulate and control the bulk properties of the material. It is therefore necessary to have a reliable technique for making such measurements.

Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC), also referred to as Gel Permeation Chromatography (GPC) or Gel Filtration (GF), is a separations technique and subset of High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), whereby polymer molecules are separated based on their hydrodynamic volume. Sample molecules, dissolved in a suitable solvent, pass through a gel packing matrix within a column and diffuse into and out of pores within the gel. Smaller molecules diffuse more frequently and deeper into the pores of the packing matrix so that their progress through the column is impaired, whereas larger molecules penetrate fewer of the pores. In this way, molecules in a mixed sample, such as a polydisperse polymer or a mixture of protein molecules, are organized according to their size. After the separation, one or more detectors is used to characterize the sample. This always involves a concentration detector and may or may not include advanced detectors, such as light scattering and intrinsic viscosity. The primary goal of this characterization is to measure the molecular weight and molecular weight distribution but may also include the measurement of other properties such as size and structure. The measured values can then be used to understand the sample’s bulk properties.

Introduction

The bulk physical properties, such as strength and toughness, of synthetic and natural polymers, or the activity and efficacy of proteins and biopharmaceuticals are strongly dependent on their molecular properties. In a large number of industries, there is a clear and strong desire to control molecular weight and structure in order to better manipulate and control the bulk properties of the material.  

For example, in polymer chemistry, different molecular parameters can have effects on different bulk properties. For proteins, molecular weight, and therefore, oligomeric state directly relates to their activity either as a biopharmaceutical, or in an assay. The amount and size of any aggregates present in a sample will result in a loss of sample activity and in the case of biopharmaceuticals, can also stimulate an immune response affecting the efficacy and safety of such drugs.

It is therefore necessary to have a reliable technique for making such measurements. Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC), also referred to as Gel Permeation Chromatography (GPC) or Gel Filtration (GF) is defined as:

A separation technique in which separation, mainly according to the hydrodynamic volume of the molecules or particles, takes place in a porous non-adsorbing material with pores of approximately the same size as the effective dimensions in solution of the molecules to be separated.[i]

SEC is mainly used for the characterization of macromolecules including synthetic and natural polymers (including polysaccharides) as well as proteins or RNA/DNA. As SEC covers such a broad application range, the main focus areas are slightly different between applications. For synthetic and natural polymers the main purpose of the technique is typically for the determination of molecular mass averages and molecular mass distribution of the sample. For proteins, the main focus is typically the determination of monomeric and oligomeric states and their quantification. Further information, such as size, structural and compositional information, can be derived from multi-detector SEC-systems.

In addition to use at analytical level, SEC can also be applied at a preparative scale for large-scale separations or purification purposes (whereby eluting molecular weight fractions can be collected in a suitable container and isolated). SEC can also be applied to solid matter (nanoparticles) dispersed in a liquid. Despite the increasing interest in nanoparticle characterization, SEC studies on nanoparticles still form only a minor area of interest and the main focus of SEC remains on characterization on a molecular level.

Separation Mechanism

Prerequisites

SEC is a liquid chromatography (LC) method, a subset of HPLC, and requires the sample material to be completely dissolved with the individual molecules dispersed and not interacting. In certain cases, where the aim is to study assemblies of molecules, e.g. complexes of several proteins, conditions have to be chosen to keep those complexes intact. Although dissolution is straightforward for a lot of samples, care has to be taken to make sure samples do go into solution completely and do not degrade or get modified by the dissolution process.

The separation process

The columns used for SEC are filled with a gel matrix containing highly porous spherical particles. The most common materials used in these gels include cross-linked polymers like polystyrene, acrylates, dextran or silica. A constant eluent flow is forced through the column by an isocratic pump. The sample solution is introduced into the flow by means of an injection valve and loop.

Under ideal conditions, there is no interaction between the sample and the gel, meaning that the separation process should be based purely on diffusion of the analyte while the solution travels through the stationary phase.

If there is no adsorption of the analyte to the stationary phase, the separation process is purely entropically driven. The standard free energy change ∆G° of a chromatographic process is generally described by:

with ∆H° being the change in standard enthalpy, ∆S° the change in standard entropy, R the gas constant, T the absolute temperature and k the partition coefficient. With the separation being free of enthalpic contributions, the above simplifies for SEC to:

This shows that the separation process is not expected to be temperature-dependent. In practice, temperature can be seen to have a small effect on the result due to its effect on solvent viscosity and the molecules’ diffusion rates.

Furthermore, the flow rate dependency of the separation process is also limited: the flow has to be faster than the re-mixing of components due to backwards diffusion of previously separated molecules, but it should not be too fast to allow time for the separation process to happen. Also, the column packaging material sets an upper limit to the usable flow rates. Some samples might degrade during the passage through the column if too high flow rates are applied due to the shear forces within the liquid. Typically, flow rates for analytical SEC systems are in the range of 0.1 to 1.0 mL/min.

To achieve a purely diffusion driven separation process, a suitable combination of mobile and stationary phase is required where there is no interaction between the two. The analyte molecules will then diffuse in and out of the pores of the packaging material as the mobile phase carries the sample through the column. Whilst a molecule is inside a pore of the packaging material, its passage through the column will be delayed compared to the other molecules. Since smaller molecules will find their way into more of the pores in the packing gel, and also penetrate more deeply, they will be delayed more than larger molecules.  Thus the result is a separation of the molecules according to their hydrodynamic size with the larger molecules eluting first.

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