MACHEREY-NAGEL offers CHROMABOND® EASY, a polymer for SPE. Here you have a polar, bifunctional modified polystyrene divinylbenzene copolymer, where a weak ion exchanger is included. Due to the bifunctional modification it is considerably more hydrophilic than conventional PS/DVB polymers and thus easily wettable with water.

The Easy effect:
Aqueous samples can be loaded directly without preconditioning!
This means that little or even no conditioning is needed, in contrast to standard SPE materials, where recovery rates normally decrease, in the worst case down to zero! Depending on the separation problem conditioning may be required and is recommended for method development.

A positive side effect of the excellent wettability:
There is no decrease of recovery rates, if the cartridge runs dry, therefore automation is easier because a permanent vacuum can be used without supervision.

Further advantages of using this polymeric material:
• high surface, this means very high binding capacity (2 – 5 times higher than silica-based adsorbents)
• less adsorbent is needed in the cartridge (without losing sensitivity or recovery)
• faster analysis, because the height of the adsorbent bed can be reduced
• acidic or basic solvents (e. g. TFA) do not destroy the phase, or lead to unintended side products
• pH stability 1 – 14

Because of the polar modification the material is suitable for a broad range of compounds (acidic, neutral, basic, polar and nonpolar substances). Highly reproducible recovery rates are obtained, even if the cartridge runs dry (especially advantageous when using 96-well plates, where stopcocks are not available!) CHROMABOND® EASY is offered in standard 1, 3, 6 ml cartridges, as well as in cartridges for flash chromatography and in 96 plates.