Improving permeability and chromatographic performance of poly(pentaerythritol diacrylate monostearate) monolithic column via photo-induced thiol-acrylate polymerization

• Thiol-acrylate photopolymerization was adopted to prepare poly(PEDAS-co-TPTM) column.
• The column possessed bicontinuous structure.
• The column exhibited better permeability (1.68 × 10−14 m2) than poly(PEDAS) column (9.2 × 10−15 m2).
• The column exhibited lower plate heights (15.7–17.7 μm) than poly(PEDAS) column (19.1–37.9 μm).

A simple approach was developed for rapid preparation of polymeric monolithic columns in UV-transparent fused-silica capillaries via photoinitiated thiol-acrylate polymerization of pentaerythritol diacrylate monostearate (PEDAS) and trimethylolpropane tris(3-mercaptopropionate) (TPTM) within 10 min, in which the acrylate homopolymerized and copolymerized with the thiol simultaneously. The morphology, permeability and chromatographic performance of the resulting poly(PEDAS-co-TPTM) monoliths were studied. It could be observed from SEM that the morphology of poly(PEDAS-co-TPTM) monolith was rather different from that of poly(PEDAS) monolith, which was fabricated via photo-induced free radical polymerization using PEDAS as the sole monomer. Compared with poly(PEDAS) monolith, poly(PEDAS-co-TPTM) monolith possessed better permeability when they were fabricated under the same preparation conditions. By adjusting the composition of porogenic solvents, poly(PEDAS-co-TPTM) monolith exhibited lower plate heights (15.7–17.7 μm) than poly(PEDAS) monolith (19.1–37.9 μm) in μLC. In addition, 66 unique peptides were positively identified on poly(PEDAS-co-TPTM) monolith when tryptic digest of four proteins was separated by μLC-MS/MS, demonstrating its potential in proteome analysis.