Microporous hypercrosslinked polystyrene Styrosorb as a restricted access packing in sample clean-up for high performance liquid chromatography. Part I: Evaluation of restricted access properties

Styrosorb is a beaded microporous polystyrene with particle sizes between 2 and 4 μm. In spite of hypercrosslinkage the material was seen to swell in organic solvents. The native material is functionalized with Tris-groups at the outer surface of the particles. The average pore diameter was determined as 1.45±0.3 nm from size exclusion data using polystyrene and polyethylene standards in THF. The reversed phase behavior of the restricted access phase Styrosorb was investigated by injection of two test mixtures. Mixture I contained five aromatic amines, mixture II consisted of AmperozideR and four related compounds. The optimum range of mobile phase composition was assessed so that analytes were separated whilst any proteins present were eluted unretained. Due to the small particle size short columns of 29×4 mm can be used for both sample clean-up and analytical separation of AmperozideR and its metabolite.