Enhancing separations with nanoparticles

PHYS 474

Heidi R. Bednar and Amanda J. Haes. Department of Chemistry, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52240
The addition of nanomaterials to capillary electrophoresis (CE) separations has been shown to improve resolution and separation efficiencies. We hypothesize that these affects arise from changes in analyte mobility, due to both the concentration of and surface chemistry on nanoparticles. In this poster, we systematically vary these parameters to optimize the CE separation of a mixture of target biomolecules using both UV (λ = 214nm) and photodiode array (PDA; λ = 520-540nm) detection. We envision that these mechanistic studies can be applied to a variety of separation-based applications, including the detection of disease targets and environmental monitoring.