I tried to separate my substance from a protein in a sillica gel column. By mistake, it dried and cracked. Can I save the trapped substance? Can I repack it ,or at least elute all of the trapped substance?
You could simply redissolve the sample and material in a strong solvent (to elute it off), filter off the silica, dry it down, then start over with the chromatography on a fresh column.
Hello, unfortunately, you cannot (i.e. should not) re-use your silica gel in the column a second time. But you can extract all the substances from the silca material with solvents, evaporate the extract to dryness. Afterwards you can redisolve the residue and separate this extract by using a new packed silica gel column.
Theoretically you could use the silica material a second time, but nobody would know whether any compounds are still sticked and/or adsorbed on the silica material.
Much luck!
Kind regards, Klaus Peter Latté
Dear Hani Shkolnikov,
It is better to recover your substance by using a polar solvent or polar mixture of solvents.
I suggest you do not re-use again the silica gel but instead you can use another solid phase such as Sephadex to better separate your substance with protein.
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