Evaluation of guanidine-based multimodal anion exchangers for protein selectivity and orthogonality

•A new class of guanidine-based multimodal anion exchange resins were developed.•Selectivity was evaluated by gradient chromatography with a model protein library.•A bis-guanidine ligand-based resin exhibited high selectivity and orthogonality.•The pair separability and enhancement with nuvia cPrime were 0.73 and 0.42.•A QSAR model was developed with a predictive R2 of 0.85 for the test set. In this paper, we examined the chromatographic behavior of a new class of guanidine-based multimodal anion exchange resins. The selectivities and protein recoveries on these resins were first evaluated using linear gradient chromatography with a model acidic protein library at pH 5, 6 and 7. While a single-guanidine based resin exhibited significant recovery issues at high ligand density, a bis-guanidine based resin showed high recoveries of all but two of the proteins evaluated in the study. In addition, the bis-guanidine resin showed a more pH dependent selectivity pattern as compared to the low density single-guanidine resin. The salt elution range for the low density single-guanidine and bis-guanidine resins was also observed to vary from 0.250 to 0.621 M and 0.162 to 0.828 M NaCl, respectively. A QSAR model was then developed to predict the elution behavior of these proteins on the guanidine prototypes at multiple pH with overall training and test scores of 0.88 and 0.85, respectively. In addition, molecular dynamics simulations were performed with these ligands immobilized on a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) to characterize their conformational preferences and to gain insight into the molecular basis of their chromatographic behavior. Finally, a recently developed framework was employed to evaluate the separability of the bis-guanidine resin as well as its orthogonality to the multimodal cation exchanger, Nuvia cPrime. This evaluation was carried out using a second model protein library which included both acidic and basic proteins. The results of this analysis indicated that the bis-guanidine prototype exhibited both higher pair separability (0.73) and pair enhancement (0.42) as compared to the less hydrophobic commercial Nuvia aPrime 4A with pair separability and enhancement factors of 0.57 and 0.22, respectively. The enhanced selectivity and orthogonality of this new multimodal anion exchange ligand may offer potential opportunities for bioprocessing applications.