Improvement of proline chiral stationary phases by varying peptide length and linker.

Seven new stationary phases with different number of proline units and/or different linkage to silica gel were prepared and evaluated in order to improve the performance of proline chiral stationary phases. The average separation factor achieved with the 53 analytes increases with the number of proline units in the stationary phases. When the proline peptides are directly attached to the 3-methylaminopropyl silica gel without using the 6-methylaminohexanoic acid linker, the stationary phases perform better overall. For decaproline chiral stationary phase 8, the separation also depends on the mobile phase system used. For this stationary phase, the CH2Cl2/hexanes/2-propanol system significantly outperforms the 2-propanol/hexanes system. For the 53 analytes tested, the separation factors achieved with this stationary phase compare well with those for three commercial columns.