Purification of homo- and hetero-oligonucleotides using high-performance charge-transfer chromatography

Oligonucleotides employed in molecular biology have previously been purified by gel electrophoresis, gravity flow chromatography and more recently, high-performance liquid chromatography. However, these techniques have a number of problems and for this reason we investigated high-performance charge-transfer chromatography using the dye acriflavin coupled to silica as the stationary phase. Numerous oligonucleotides were purified using this technique and in this report we present data on four such oligonucleotides two homo-oligonucleotides and two hetero-oligonucleotides. Homogeneity of oligonucleotides eluted from the acriflavin matrices was determined by electrophoresis on 20% polyacrylamide gels and in each case they were greater than 90% pure.