Supelco, a division of Sigma-Aldrich (SIAL), has launched a liquid chromatography (HPLC) column Ascentis Express Peptide ES-C18 based on a new 160 angstrom Fused-Core particle design.

HPLC is a seperation technique that utilizes different types of stationary phase, a pump generating a gradient of two different solvents, a steel enforced column and an apparatus for measuring the absorbance. This column design exhibits high column efficiency, providing a stable, reversed phase packing with a pore structure and pore size that is optimized for reversed-phase HPLC separations of peptides and polypeptides.

Supelco said that the other key applications of the Ascentis Express Peptide ES-C18 for the bioseparations and analysis market include peptide mapping, natural and synthetic peptide analysis, and oligonucleotide analysis. This technology is the newest addition to the Ascentis Express product line, a family of HPLC columns designed to provide the analysis speed and resolving power of sub-2-micron columns with a 50% reduction in backpressure.

The new columns were engineered to separate higher molecular weight compounds such as peptides and small proteins. Ascentis Express Peptide ES-C18 columns contain advanced Fused-Core particles that have bigger pores, bonded with steric-protected C18 ligands to provide extra stability (ES) at low pH and high temperatures, which expands the application range for Ascentis Express columns.

This new C18 bonded phase offers method development analysts additional separation selectivity to complement the existing Ascentis Express C18, C8, RP-Amide, and HILIC phases.

Wayne Way, marketing manager of HPLC-GC at Sigma-Aldrich, said: “Many peptides have been investigated as therapeutic pharmaceutical drugs to treat diseases such as cancer, diabetes and immune-related disorders. The recent growth in research of peptides as therapeutic drugs is in part due to the improvement in manufacturing of peptides.

“It is an exciting area of research due to the pharmacological advantages of peptides as well as the drug delivery challenges. Ascentis Express Peptide ES-C18 can be used to accelerate research tasks of identification, purity monitoring, and quantitative analysis of peptides faster and with greater resolution than traditional HPLC columns.”