Liquid Chromatographic Separation Using a 2 μm i.d. Open Tubular Column at Elevated Temperature

We have experimentally demonstrated the extraordinarily high resolving power of liquid chromatography (LC) using a narrow open tubular (OT) column. In this work, we show that we can further increase its efficiency, peak capacity, and separation speed by elevating the operation (or column) temperature; all of these three numbers can be improved without mutual compromises. We use a mixture of five amino acids as a sample and show that we can increase the efficiency by 34%-260% and the separation speeds by 7%-10% by raising the operation temperature from 30 to 70 °C. When we use a 2 μm i.d. × 80 cm in length OT column coated with OTMS at a temperature of 70 °C, we can frequently obtain peak capacities of 700-800 within 20-30 min for separating cytochrome C digests. By increasing the column length to 160 cm, we can obtain a peak capacity of 2720 within 143 min for separating a complex peptide sample. This peak capacity is the highest peak capacity to date for one-dimensional LC separations. Importantly, heating the column is easy to implement and does not cost much, and many commercial LC systems already have compartments to control column temperatures. Running LC using a narrow OT column at an elevated temperature should broaden the applications of OT-LC in chemical and biochemical analyses.