Microscale Purification with Direct Charged Aerosol Detector Quantitation Using Selective Online One- or Two-Dimensional Liquid Chromatography

The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly faced with challenging separations of complex crude reaction mixtures at the microscale that require the adoption of new platforms for rapid target isolation, impurity determination, and quantitation. In this study, we describe an online microscale one- or two-dimensional liquid chromatography (1D/2D-LC) system with heart-cutting and multi (triple) detector triggering in either dimension to address this need. The advantages of charged aerosol detection (CAD) are discussed for the direct quantitation of limited quantity samples, without utilizing a second analytical instrument or gradient compensation pump. In addition to the significant time and cost savings, there is no minimum recovery requirement that exists when compared to gravimetric methods for accurate microscale quantitation. This platform has been successfully used to purify 0.5-5.0 mg scale reactions in 96- or 384-well reaction plates with a gradient time of 4 min per sample. Separations performed in both dimensions are complete in less than 12 min, including trapping and column equilibration time. The isolated arrays of small-quantity investigational compounds at a high purity enable rapid exploration of chemical reaction parameters and synthetic route scouting for biological target validation.

Automated summary

This study presents an online microscale liquid chromatography system for rapid target isolation and quantitation. The system offers significant time and cost savings, as well as the ability to directly quantify limited quantity samples.