Agilent and Waters give HPLC a Makeover

Courtesy of Waters

Long the method of choice for fast, accurate protein purification, HPLC has been revamped in recent months. Two companies, Agilent Technologies in Palo Alto, Calif., and Waters in Milford, Mass., released new high-performance liquid chromatography systems designed specifically for the microscale sample requirements of mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Though they adopt different approaches, both systems have been hailed by developers and users alike as harbingers of liquid chromatography's next wave.

Water's http://www.waters.com new Acquity UPLC (ultra-performance liquid chromatography) system exploits the basic principles of chromatography to deliver a high-throughput, high-resolution instrument designed for use with or without mass spectrometers. "The end result is speed, sensitivity, and resolution that is above and beyond anything that people see today with HPLC," says John Morawski, UPLC program manager for Waters.

Central to UPLC is the 1.7 μm, ethane-bridged, hybrid silica-polymer particle used as a column-packing material (conventional methods use 5-μm particles). ...