Coupling Flow Field Flow Fractionation to ICP-MS for the Detection and Characterization of Silver Nanoparticles

A team of researchers have created an innovative analytical platform combining asymmetrical flow field-flow fractionation (AF4) with native mass spectrometry (nMS) to characterize non-covalent protein complexes, providing valuable insights into their stability and higher-order structures.

Waters Corporation has purchased Wyatt Technology, expanding both parties' reach in biopharmaceutical development and creating better healthcare technology for all.

In this extended special feature to celebrate the 35th anniversary edition of LCGC Europe, key opinion leaders from the separation science community explore contemporary trends in separation science and identify possible future developments.

Field-flow fractionation (FFF) coupled to light scattering is a powerful method to separate and characterize nanoparticles, proteins, and polymers from a few nanometres to a few micrometres. The technique is one of the few that can cover the full size range of nanomaterials and provide high-resolution size distributions and additional characterization. New developments in FFF enhance performance and productivity.

Flow-field flow fractionation (flow-FFF) offers highly versatile separations for the analysis of complex fluids, covering a size range of macromolecules and particles from 1 nm to 10,000 nm. However, flow-FFF is often perceived as a difficult technique to learn because of the multiple parameters available for adjustment. Recent advances in software for simulating flow-FFF overcome this obstacle, enabling the virtual optimization of flow-FFF methods and opening up the power of flow-FFF separations to non-experts. An added benefit is the ability to easily analyze particle size distributions by elution time from first principles.

The evaluation of the oral uptake of engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) contained in personal care products like mouthwashes is of great relevance to estimate the potential hazards and the toxicity of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs). Various experiments were performed while two commercially available mouthwash products (named M1 and M2) were selected as samples of interest. Asymmetric flow field‑flow fractionation (AF4) was chosen and optimized as the particle separation technique and two detectors were on-line coupled while dynamic light scattering (DLS) was used for evaluation and signals obtained by ultraviolet–visible (UV–vis) detection at 254 nm were used to gather additional information about the fate of the ENPs.