RPC-04

Use of Ion Pairing reagents in RPC

Ion pairing reagents are mainly used in RPC to make the analytes to interact with stationary phase (refer previous RPC posts). Ion pairing reagents will bind to the ionic molecules in the analyte via ionic interactions which make the hydrophobic groups present in the analyte to be exposed out for the affinity of binding with stationary phase. Trifluoroacetic acid is mostly used as an ion pairing reagent for the reversed phase separation of peptides (Glajch J L et al, 1987) (Shibue M et al, 2005). Here, the negatively charged trifluoroacetate interacts with the positively charged amino acid residues and makes the analyte less hydrophilic. (Geraldine Thevenon, 1989)