Ultra-Fast Preparative and Purification Liquid Chromatograph

Shimadzu has released the Prominence UFPLC Ultra-Fast Preparative and Purification Liquid Chromatograph, which enables fast recovery of highly purified target compounds from complex samples such as organic synthesis reaction mixtures and natural products. Conventional workflows utilising preparative liquid chromatography (Prep LC) yield fractions with significant water content which can take eight hours or more to evaporate and typically cannot be completely removed, resulting in a powder with poor weight purity. The Prominence UFPLC offers a single automated workflow that utilises on-line fraction trapping as an alternative to traditional fraction collection, allowing elution of collected compounds in highly volatile organic solvents that can easily be evaporated, resulting in ultrahigh weight purity compounds in about 90 minutes. The Prominence UFPLC greatly improves the efficiency of preparative fraction collection and purification workflows in pharmaceutical, food, chemical and other industries as well as research organisations.

The Prominence UFPLC seamlessly integrates traditional Prep LC with novel fraction trapping for up to five compounds of interest. The instrument is controlled by a dedicated walk-up software designed to empower non-expert users to easily set conditions for chromatographic separation and isolation of target compounds, trapping, purifying, eluting and collecting highly purified compounds in as little as 90 minutes. For applications involving the isolation of low concentration targets, replicate injection and collection to the same trapping column to increase the amount of compound trapped on column prior to elution is easily accomplished.

Shimadzu's ‘Shim-pack C2P-H’ trapping column strongly retains target compounds, allowing unwanted organic solvents, water and additives to be flushed away. Additionally, rinsing the column with an aqueous ammonia solution after trapping allows compounds to be recovered as free bases which are generally easier to powderise, typically resulting in higher quality results when used in drug screening and pharmacokinetic studies.

The Prominence UFPLC is available in two configurations. The base configuration contains a single trapping column that can isolate, purify and elute a single target compound from the sample, whereas the advanced configuration is equipped with five trapping columns allowing isolation, purification and elution of up to five targets from a single sample.