One step physically adsorbed coating of silica capillary with excellent stability for the separation of basic proteins by capillary zone electrophoresis.

The coating of capillary inner surface is considered to be an effective approach to suppress the adsorption of proteins on capillary inner surface in CE. However, most of coating materials reported are water-soluble, which may dissolve in BGE during the procedure of electrophoresis. In this study, a novel strategy for selection of physically coating materials has been illustrated to get coating layer with excellent stability using materials having poor solubility in commonly used solvents. Taking natural chitin as example (not hydrolyzed water soluble chitosan), a simple one step coating method using chitin solution in hexafluoroisopropanol was adopted within only 21 min with good coating reproducibility (RSDs of EOF for within-batch coated capillaries of 1.55% and between-batch coated capillaries of 2.31%), and a separation of four basic proteins on a chitin coated capillary was performed to evaluate the coating efficacy. Using chitin coating, the adsorption of proteins on capillary inner surface was successfully suppressed with reversed and stable EOF, and four basic proteins including lysozyme, cytochrome c, ribonuclease A and α-chymotrypsinogen A were baseline separated within 16 min with satisfied separation efficiency using 20 mM pH 2.0 H3PO4-Na2HPO4 as back ground electrolyte and 20 kV as separation voltage. What is more important, the chitin coating layer could be stable for more than two months during this study, which demonstrates that chitin is an ideal material for preparing semi-permanent coating on bare fused silica capillary inner wall and has hopeful potential in routine separation of proteins with CE.