Clickable Periodic Mesoporous Organosilica Monolith for Highly Efficient Capillary Chromatographic Separation

Abstract

A novel clickable periodic mesoporous organosilica monolith with the surface area up to 1707 m(2) g(-1) was in situ synthesized in the capillary by the one-step condensation of the organobridged-bonded alkoxysilane precursor bis(triethoxysilyl)ethylene. With Si-C bonds in the skeleton, the monolith possesses excellent chemical and mechanical stability. With vinyl groups highly loaded and homogeneously distributed throughout the structure, the monolith can be readily functionalized with functional groups by effective thiol-ene "click" chemistry reaction. Herein, with "click" modification of C18, the obtained monolith was successfully applied for capillary liquid chromatographic separation of small molecules and proteins. The column efficiency could reach 148,000 N/m, higher than most reported hybrid monoliths. Moreover, intact proteins could be separated well with good reproducibility, even after the monolithic column was exposed by basic mobile phase (pH 10.0) overnight, demonstrating the great promising of such monolith for capillary chromatographic separation.