Preparation and chromatographic evaluation of hydrophilic polymer brushes grafted-silica with post modification of silicon/carbon dots as a green liquid chromatography stationary phase

Polar stationary phases were prepared by grafting hydrophilic acrylamide (Am) polymer brushes with post modification of carbon dots (CDs) and silicon dots (SiDs) onto SiO 2 particles. The prepared stationary phases, SiO 2 -PAm-CDs, SiO 2 -PAm-CDs/SiDs, and SiO 2 -PAm-SiDs, were packed as chromatographic columns, respectively. Using nucleic bases, organic acids, and β-agonists as target substances to investigate the influence of chromatographic conditions on retention and separation, the packed columns showed the partitioning and adsorption of mixed retention behavior in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography mode and successfully separated the polar compounds. Most importantly, under per aqueous liquid chromatography mode (using 100% water as mobile phase), those columns still had good separation ability toward nucleic bases, β-agonist, and organic acids. Because AM is a temperature-sensitive monomer, the resulting van’t Hoff curves exhibited a nonlinear relationship, having temperature-responsive chromatographic characteristic under pure water separation. Hence, building on temperature-sensitive characteristics and pure water of separation conditions, the separation selectivity toward hydrophilic compounds greatly improved. Compared with the commercial hydrophilic columns, the efficiency of our developed column had the superior ability in separation and detection of betaine in Goji berry with the enhanced resolution achieved in the proposed green separation method (just using pure water as mobile phase). Graphical Abstract