Portable capillary LC for in-line UV monitoring and MS detection: Comparable sensitivity and much lower solvent consumption.

Pharmaceutical development currently relies on quality separation methods from early discovery through to line-of-site manufacturing. There have been significant advancements made regarding the column particle packing, internal diameter, length connectivity, the understanding of the impact key parameters like void volume, flow rate, and temperature all that affects the resultant separation quality, that is, resolution, peak shape, peak width, run time, and signal-to-noise ratio. There is however a strong need to establish better alternatives to large bulky high-performance liquid chromatography racks either for process analytical reaction monitoring or mass spectrometry analysis in establishing product quality. Compact, portable high-pressure liquid chromatography can be a more efficient alternative to traditional ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography and traditional liquid chromatography. The compact versatile instrument evaluated here allows good separation control with either the on-board column with fixed ultra-violet wavelength cartridge or for use with a high-resolution mass spectrometry. Significant space reduction results in greener lab spaces with improved energy efficiency for smaller labs with lower energy demands. In addition, this compact liquid chromatography was used as a portable reaction monitoring solution to compare forced degradation kinetics and assess portable liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry capability for the analyses required for pharmaceutical drug product testing.

Raman hyperspectral imaging with multivariate analysis for investigating enzyme immobilization.

Directed enzyme evolution has led to significant application of biocatalysis for improved chemical transformations throughout the scientific and industrial communities. Biocatalytic reactions utilizing evolved enzymes immobilized within microporous supports have realized unique advantages, including notably higher enzyme stability, higher enzyme load, enzyme reusability, and efficient product-enzyme separation. To date, limited analytical methodology is available to discern the spatial and chemical distribution of immobilized enzymes, in which techniques for surface visualization, enzyme stability, or activity are instead employed. New analytical tools to investigate enzyme immobilization are therefore needed. In this work, development, application, and evaluation of an analytical methodology to study enzyme immobilization is presented. Specifically, Raman hyperspectral imaging with principal component analysis, a multivariate method, is demonstrated for the first time to investigate evolved enzymes immobilized onto microporous supports for biocatalysis. Herein we demonstrate the ability to spatially and spectrally resolve evolved pantothenate kinase (PanK) immobilized onto two commercially-available, chemically-diverse porous resins. This analytical methodology is able to chemically distinguish evolved enzyme, resin, and chemical species pertinent to immobilization. As such, a new analytical approach to study immobilized biocatalysts is demonstrated, offering potential wide application for analysis of protein or biomolecule immobilization.

A 502-Base Free-Solution Electrophoretic DNA Sequencing Method Using End-Attached Wormlike Micelles.

We demonstrate that the use of wormlike nonionic micelles as drag-tags in end-labeled free-solution electrophoresis ("micelle-ELFSE") provides single-base resolution of Sanger sequencing products up to 502 bases in length, a nearly 2-fold improvement over reported ELFSE separations. "CiEj" running buffers containing 48 mM C12E5, 6 mM C10E5, and 3 M urea (32.5 °C) form wormlike micelles that provide a drag equivalent to an uncharged DNA fragment with a length (α) of 509 bases (effective Rh = 27 nm). Runtime in a 40 cm capillary (30 kV) was 35 min for elution of all products down to the 26-base primer. We also show that smaller Triton X-100 micelles give a read length of 103 bases in a 4 min run, so that a combined analysis of the Sanger products using the two buffers in separate capillaries could be completed in 14 min for the full range of lengths. A van Deemter analysis shows that resolution is limited by diffusion-based peak broadening and wall adsorption. Effects of drag-tag polydispersity are not observed, despite the inherent polydispersity of the wormlike micelles. We ascribe this to a stochastic size-sampling process that occurs as micelle size fluctuates rapidly during the runtime. A theoretical model of the process suggests that fluctuations occur with a time scale less than 10 ms, consistent with the monomer exchange process in nonionic micelles. The CiEj buffer has a low viscosity (2.7 cP) and appears to be semidilute in micelle concentration. The large drag-tag size of the CiEj buffers leads to steric segregation of the DNA and tag for short fragments and attendant mobility shifts.

Dynamic sampling in autonomous process optimization.

Autonomous process optimization (APO) is a technology that has recently found utility in a multitude of process optimization challenges. In contrast to most APO examples in microflow reactor systems, we recently presented a system capable of optimization in high-throughput batch reactor systems. The drawback of APO in a high-throughput batch reactor system is the reliance on reaction sampling at a predetermined static timepoint rather than a dynamic endpoint. Static timepoint sampling can lead to the inconsistent capture of the process performance under each process parameter permutation. This is important because critical process behaviors such as rate acceleration accompanied by decomposition could be missed entirely. To address this drawback, we implemented a dynamic reaction endpoint determination strategy to capture the product purity once the process stream stabilized. We accomplished this through the incorporation of a real-time plateau detection algorithm into the APO workflow to measure and report the product purity at the dynamically determined reaction endpoint. We then applied this strategy to the autonomous optimization of a photobromination reaction towards the synthesis of a pharmaceutically relevant intermediate. In doing so, we not only uncovered process conditions to access the desired monohalogenation product in 85 UPLC area % purity with minimal decomposition risk, but also measured the effect of each parameter on the process performance. Our results highlight the advantage of incorporating dynamic sampling in APO workflows to drive optimization toward a stable and high-performing process.

Design of an in vitro biocatalytic cascade for the manufacture of islatravir.

Enzyme-catalyzed reactions have begun to transform pharmaceutical manufacturing, offering levels of selectivity and tunability that can dramatically improve chemical synthesis. Combining enzymatic reactions into multistep biocatalytic cascades brings additional benefits. Cascades avoid the waste generated by purification of intermediates. They also allow reactions to be linked together to overcome an unfavorable equilibrium or avoid the accumulation of unstable or inhibitory intermediates. We report an in vitro biocatalytic cascade synthesis of the investigational HIV treatment islatravir. Five enzymes were engineered through directed evolution to act on non-natural substrates. These were combined with four auxiliary enzymes to construct islatravir from simple building blocks in a three-step biocatalytic cascade. The overall synthesis requires fewer than half the number of steps of the previously reported routes.

Morphological characterization of self-assembled peptide nucleic acid amphiphiles.

Peptide nucleic acid amphiphiles (PNAA) are a promising set of materials for sequence-specific separation of nucleic acids from complex mixtures. To implement PNAA in micellar separations, the morphology and size of PNAA micelles in the presence and absence of a sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) cosurfactant have been studied by small-angle X-ray scattering and dynamic light scattering. We find that a 6-mer PNAA with a 12-carbon n-alkane tail forms ellipsoidal micelles (a = 5.15 nm; b = 3.20 nm) above its critical micelle concentration (CMC) of 110.9 microM. On addition of a stoichiometric amount of complementary DNA, PNAA hybridizes to DNA, suppressing the formation of PNAA micelles. At a ratio of 19:1 SDS/PNAA (total concentration = 20 mM), spherical micelles are formed with outer radius Rs = 2.67 nm, slightly larger than spherical micelles of pure SDS. Capillary electrophoresis studies show that PNAA/DNA duplexes do not comicellize with SDS micelles. No such effects are observed using noncomplementary DNA. The shape and size of the PNAA micelles is also verified by dynamic light scattering (DLS) studies. These results provide an interesting case study with competing electrostatic, hydrophobic, and hydrogen-bonding interactions in micellar systems and make possible the use of PNAA in micellar separations of DNA oligomers.

Length-dependent DNA separations using multiple end-attached peptide nucleic acid amphiphiles in micellar electrokinetic chromatography.

End-labeled free-solution electrophoresis (ELFSE) is an alternative approach to gel-based methods for size-based electrophoretic separation of DNA. In ELFSE, an electrically neutral "drag-tag" is appended to DNA to add significant hydrodynamic drag, thereby breaking its constant charge-to-friction ratio. Current drag-tag architecture relies on covalent attachment of polymers to each DNA molecule. We have recently proposed the use of micellar drag-tags in conjunction with sequence-specific hybridization of peptide nucleic acid amphiphiles (PNAAs). This work investigates the effect of multiple PNAA attachment on DNA resolution using MEKC. Simultaneous PNAA hybridization allows for the separation of long DNA targets, up to 1012 bases, using micellar drag-tags. Each PNAA handle independently interacts with the micellar phase, reducing the overall mobility of this complex relative to individual PNAA binding. The sequence- and size-based dependence of this separation technique is maintained with multiple PNAA binding over a range of DNA sizes. Results are accurately described by ELFSE theory, yielding alpha=54 for single-micelle tagging and alpha=142 for dual-micelle tagging. This method is the first example of a non-covalent drag-tag used to separate DNA of 1000 bases based on both size and sequence.

Identification of PCR products using PNA amphiphiles in micellar electrokinetic chromatography.

We present a method to identify single-stranded PCR products of varying lengths by hybridization of n-alkylated peptide nucleic acids (PNA amphiphiles) to the products, followed by separation with micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC). These end-attached PNA amphiphiles (PNAA) partition to nonionic micelles in the running buffer (Triton X-100), linking the tagged DNA to the micellar drag-tag. This linkage shifts the electrophoretic mobility of a tagged component away from both untagged DNA and tagged DNA of different lengths. The mobility of the tagged DNA is established by its extent of partitioning to the micelle phase as well as its size relative to the attached micelle. A model is presented that can be used to determine the length of an unknown oligomer given an experimentally obtained mobility. We find that the collective action of micelles that transiently attach to the tagged DNA impart about the same hydrodynamic drag as covalently bound "drag-tags" of a similar size. With the use of the PNAA-MEKC method, PCR products of 88, 134, 216, and 447 bases are clearly resolved in less than 5 min. To our knowledge, this work represents the first use of surfactant micelles as drag-tags to separate DNA in capillary electrophoresis. Furthermore, the PNAA tag only attaches to DNA containing a target sequence, helping ensure that only the desired PCR products are analyzed.