A fluorous porous polymer monolith photo-patterned chromatographic column for the separation of a...

A fluorous porous polymer stationary phase is photo-patterned within a glass microfluidic chip to conduct CEC. During free radical-initiated polymerization, extraneous polymer forms and contributes to excessive microfluidic channel clogging. Nitrobenzene is explored as free radical quencher to limit clogging by minimizing extraneous polymer formation and a number of initiator to quencher ratios are explored with a 0.5:1 quencher (nitrobenzene): initiator (benzoin methyl ether) molar ratio shown to be optimal. The microchip patterned with a fluorous monolith was used to carry out the electrochromatographic analysis of a mixture containing fluorescent and fluorous labeling products. The fluorous monolithic column shows fluorous selectivity for compounds labeled with perfluoromethylene tags and a custom peptide is synthesized that possesses functional groups that can be both fluorescently and fluorously labeled. MALDI MS was used to identify the labeled fragments and microchip based electrochromatography was used to analyze the resulting labeling mixture. This is the first report to our knowledge that uses fluorous porous polymer monolith within a microchip to separate analytes using fluorous-fluorous interactions.