A new exchanger for the chromatographic fractionation of nucleic acids

✍ Scribed by Kendric C. Smith; Stella Rebhun; Henry S. Kaplan

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1960
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 667 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-2697
• DOI: 10.1016/0003-2697(60)90046-4

✦ Synopsis

Fractionations

of the nucleic acids have been accomplished by selective elution from various adsorbents and exchanger materials such as calcium phosphate (l), Dowex 2 (2), a modified cellulose exchanger Ecteola (3), histone-coated kieselguhr (4), methylated bovine serum albumin, and Celite (5, 6) ; and by the dissociation of denatured nucleoprotein complexes (7, 8). Of these materials the one which has seemingly proved t.o be the most useful is Ecteola, a triethanolamine derivative of cellulose ( 9). It has been used for the fractionation of both deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) (3), and ribonucleic acid (RNA) (10, 11). It is reported, however, that as much as 3 weeks may be required to complete a fractionation (12). Attempts to shorten this time by increasing the elution rate resulted in a reduction of the resolving power of the exchanger and caused the peaks to overlap (12).

A survey of commercially available exchanger materials was made in an attempt to find a material which might offer advantages not exhibited by existing exchangers. One such product that has been investigated in this laboratory is a cationic starch called Cato-2 (formerly known as Cato-8, National Starch Products, Inc., 750 Third Ave., New York 17, N. Y.). This report describes the technique used for fractionating nucleic acids on columns of Cato-2 and presents results to substantiate the effectiveness of these fractionations. METHODS Cato-2 is manufactured under U. S. Patent No. 2,813,093 and is described therein as an ungelatinized tertiary amino alkyl ether of starch.