Principal Investigator:
Yongsong Huang, PhD, Professor
Department of Geological Sciences
Brown University
Providence, RI
Brief Description:
This invention is a series of novel chromatographic materials for separating and identifying organic molecules and compounds. Highly useful in detections and analysis of environmental pollutants, pharmarceutical and food contaminants, this novel-chemistry makes available a new chromatographic medium with a high affinity and specificity to compounds having intramolecular p bonds (e. g., carbon-carbon double or triple bonds), and performs a highly efficient and rapid separation of samples yielding non-overlapping peaks of purified materials compared to traditional media.
Current silver nitrate-based chromatographic technology, or argentation chromatography, has been used for chromatographic separation for more than five decades and is considered a critical technique for separating carbon-carbon double bond containing compounds especially lipids. There are many problems with argentation chromatography including instability upon exposure to light, general instability of the medium, irreuable, time consuming, expensive, poor chromatography due to leaching of silver ions.
A series of novel chromatographic media has been invented by Prof. Huang’ research group. The new media are stable during storage at room temperature, not degraded by exposure to light, reusable and economical for large-scale industrial chemical separations providing accurate, reproducible and reliable results. Our research shows that these novel chromatographic media can be utilized in all applications where argentation chromatography is currently used, yet yields results that are better than are achieved by argentation chromatography and will essentially replace argentation chromatography.
Information:
US patent application 13/760,497 is pending
Corresponding foreign application is pending