Systematic evaluation and optimization of high-performance liquid chromatography separation of polyoxins

The chromatographic behavior of a kind of nucleoside peptides, polyoxins, was investigated in this study. Molecular simulation technique was used to elucidate the temperature-dependent peak sharpening of polyoxins. There was a relatively small energy barrier between the global minimum conformer and the local minimum conformer of polyoxin A and the high temperature helped to quickly cross the energy barrier and accelerate the conformational transformation for getting the global minimum, so that stationary phase could not identify these two conformations and presented a sharp peak. Two kinds of mixed-mode columns, strong cation exchange or strong anion exchange ligands bonded with C18 (C18SCX and C18SAX) were used to improve separation selectivity of four polyoxins (A, K, F, H). The electrostatic attraction was necessary to increase the retention to ensure that the alkyl chain can give better play to its hydrophobic effect. Therefore, four polyoxins were well separated on C18SCX at pH 2 and they were also well separated on C18SAX at pH 7. In the small-scale purification of polyoxins, the sample loading of the C18SCX was five times than that of the C18SAX and the purity of the collected four polyoxins was all over 90%.