Retention and efficiency of a novel slalom chromatography column: An alternative to agarose gel electrophoresis for...

Slalom chromatography (SC) has recently been revitalized through the latest available UHPLC columns and systems, alongside advances in better understanding its separation and mass transfer mechanisms. These developments have demonstrated its potential in the analysis of cell and gene therapy drug substances, including plasmid topology analysis, DNA restriction mapping, dsRNA impurity detection in IVT mRNA, and CRISPR-Cas9 ribonucleoprotein assays. However, SC's quantitative superiority over traditional agarose gel electrophoresis (AGE) remains unproven, and no accurate and predictive model has yet been reported for any commercial SC column for a wide range of experimental conditions of temperature, flow rate, and buffer concentration. This study evaluates the retention and efficiency of a novel SC column (Waters GT×Resolve^TM 250 Å Slalom Column, MaxPeak^TM Premier Technology, 2.5μm, 4.6 × 300 mm) for the separation of double-stranded DNA. Retention maps were generated across a wide range of flow rates (0.1-1.5 mL/min), tris-acetate-EDTA (TAE) buffer concentrations (4-400 mM, pH 8.2), and temperatures (23 °C to 80 °C), up to 10,000 psi column back pressure. These data supported the development of an SC simulator to optimize conditions for DNA restriction mapping. SC was applied to a 1 kb DNA ladder (1-10 kbp), λ-DNA BstII digest (1.3-8.5 kbp), λ-DNA HindIII digest (2-23.1 kbp), and λ-DNA Monocut Mix (1-48.5 kbp), and compared with AGE. This novel SC platform provides a high-performance, UHPLC-compatible alternative to AGE, offering improvements in ease of use (standard UHPLC method), accuracy (± 0.3%), speed (× 20), sensitivity (× 10) and peak capacity (× 2) for DNA analysis in cell/gene therapy and directed evolution workflows. SC also facilitates the collection of sample fractions for secondary analyses.