Application of capillary electrophoresis to the separation of structurally diverse N-(substituted)-glycine-peptoid combinatorial mixtures

The capillary electrophoresis (CE)-based separation of five N-(substituted)-glycine (NSG)-peptoid mixtures with a wide range of physical and chemical properties was studied. A CE separation, initially developed using a single representative peptoid mixture, with a background electrolyte (BGE) modified by the addition of both methyl-beta-cyclodextrin and heptane sulfonic acid was found to provide good separations of most of the combinatorial mixtures investigated. For those mixtures not separated well by this procedure, the use of SDS micelles in conjunction with methyl-beta-cyclodextrin resulted in dramatic improvements in the separation. While no single set of separation conditions proved sufficient for all of the NSG-peptoid combinatorial mixtures, the two methods were able to provide separation sufficient for characterization of a set of mixtures with a wide range of physical and chemical properties. The efficiency of the CE-based separation of the combinatorial mixtures studied was compared to a reversed-phase liquid chromatographic method using gradient elution.