Glycine-modified organic polymer monolith featuring zwitterionic functionalities for hydrophilic capillary electrochromatography

Abscract Allylglycine, a conventional amino acid derivative, possesses typical zwitterionic and hydrophilic functionalities deriving from the carboxyl and amino groups in its structure. A novel monolithic column poly(allylglycine-co-1, 3, 5-triacryloylhexahydro-1, 3, 5-triazine) (AGly-co-TAT) with powerful hydrophilic selectivity and obvious zwitterionic feature was synthesized successfully with the monomer allyglycine and the cross-linker 1, 3, 5-triacryloylhexahydro-1, 3, 5-triazine through in-situ copolymerization for capillary electrochromatography. The obtained monolithic column has good permeability. Due to the zwitterionic functional groups of allylglycine, the poly(AGly-co-TAT) monolithic column can generate a cathodic and anodic electroosmotic flow (EOF) by changing the mobile phase pH, which is beneficial to expand its application range. The separations of different series of polar analytes, thioureas, xanthines, phenols, peptides and acidic compounds are achieved on this hydrophilic monolithic column due to the powerful hydrophilic, electrostatic and hydrogen bond interactions. Using this monolithic column, hydrophilic separations are achieved even at a lower level of 50% organic solvent. The separation efficiency up to 1.41 × 105 N m−1 and 1.19 × 105 N m−1 is achieved for the separation of theophylline and phenol, respectively. For a real sample, cytochrome C digestion, the monolithic column shows good separation performance, which offers the potential application of the monolithic column on proteomics study.