The life science industry routinely uses automated compound synthesis to produce combinatorial libraries of structurally related compounds that need to be screened for potential pharmaceutical activity.
HPLC is used to screen for purity. Due to the number of samples involved, using short columns with high flow rates and steep gradients maximises throughput.
For gradient HPLC analysis, as the traditional method of detection is UV, compounds must be UV active and have similar extinction coefficients for ease of quantification. For HTS, this does not always apply, so an alternative detector is required.
The PL-ELS 1000 detector can be used with ultra-fast extreme organic/water gradients. It is therefore ideally suited to rapid high throughput screening analyses. LC-MS has become an invaluable analytical tool for identification and quantification measurements involving a large number of samples across a wide range of application areas.
Some compounds, such as those with little or no UV chromophore, can benefit from enhanced LC-MS capability by interfacing with the high sensitivity, PL-ELS 1000 evaporative light scattering detector.
The PL-ELS 1000 from Polymer Laboratories has become the standard add-on to LC-MS systems used in many major life science industrial labs. The PL-ELS 1000 can detect the presence of a compound, which may not be clearly identified by UV, for example.
Once the compound is detected by ELS, the LC-MS can provide more detailed information. The PL-ELS 1000 can also generate concentration information and intelligence on compounds which don’t ionise or ’fly’ on the LC-MS. These benefits have proved to be particularly useful for combichem library analysis.
Key design features of the PL-ELS 1000 lend themselves to extremely low band broadening which, together with a noise free baseline, results in high resolution separations even with the rapid gradient elution commonplace in LC-MS methods.
The PL-ELS 1000 and LC-MS systems share similar chromatographic requirements, in that eluent must be volatile. The PL-ELS 1000 is compatible with and complementary to LC-MS systems, with the ELS providing concentration information and the mass spectrometer the actual atomic and molecular compositional analysis.
For maximum flexibility and optimum choice, the evaporative light scattering detector can be used alone or as one of several detectors. It can be situated as the last detector inline, or the flow can be split part to the PL-ELS 1000 and part to other detectors (eg, MS).
The design of the detector ensures a controllable, stable split ratio throughout the analysis.
For further details, please contact:
Polymer Laboratories Ltd, Essex Road, Church Stretton, Shropshire SY6 6AX, UK, Tel: +44 1694-723 581; Fax: +44 1694-722 171; Email: PLInfo@polymerlabs.com website: www.polymerlabs.com
