Monolith Columns

Monoliths are continuous stationary phases available in a variety of shapes and sizes and have shown potential to be developed with chromatographic ligands. Monoliths are polymerised directly into a single unit although, for biotechnology purposes, many regular monolith tubes are prepared and interlaced into a single column with a limited pore size of around 5 mm.Monoliths show great potential for providing high mass transfer through convective flow, thus enabling both capacity and resolution to be independent of flow rate. A further perceived advantage over conventional chromatographic beds is that they do not require packing and therefore reduce validation and labour costs. However, despite the fact that monoliths are being developed for affinity and ionexchange chromatography, they have as yet not been able to make significant inroads into industrial-scale protein purification processing, largely due to technical problems involved in developing large-scale monolith columns. One use of monoliths that has been commercially validated is for the purification of pharmaceutical-grade plasmid DNA.

Success has been more readily achieved in this case as there are clear capacity advantages over conventional chromatographic resins which have porous internal structures designed for smaller protein-sized molecules. This capacity advantage may also translate to purifications of other very large molecular structures such as virus-like particles and viruses.