ABSTRACT

Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) is the established method to determine macromolecular properties in solution. It is the only technique that allows efficient measurement of property distributions for a wide range of applications. Recent trends in industrial laboratories and research institutes have been focused on increasing the analytical throughput in order to increase productivity. Quality control and combinatorial chemistry demand the optimization of high-throughput methods. Increased analytical throughput can also save time and resources (e.g., instrumentation) in production-related fields. In combinatorial research, high-throughput analytical techniques are a bare necessity, because of the huge numbers of samples being synthesized.[1,2; and references therein] In either situation, the slowest step in the process will determine the overall turnaround time. The importance of high-speed analytical techniques becomes obvious when research companies synthesize over 500 targets per day, but only about 100 samples can be analyzed. The potential of new synthetic methods and in-line production control cannot be fully utilized until the typical SEC run times of 40 min are substantially reduced.