High-Performance Liquid Chromatography of Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins. 123. Dynamics of Peptides in Reversed-Phase High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

The dynamics of several peptides in reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) have been investigated on both n-octadecyl (C18) silica and n-butyl (C4) silica sorbents. In particular, the conformational interconversions and the relative rates of chromatographic relaxation of bombesin, glucagon, and β-endorphin on both C18 and C4 n-alkylsilicas were monitored by examining changes in the experimental bandwidths of these peptides as a function of temperature and column residence time under linear gradient elution RP-HPLC conditions. The observed band-broadening trends were correlated with previously derived retention parameters and thermodynamic descriptors of the association process determined for bombesin, β-endorphin, glucagon, and a control peptide, penta-l-phenylalanine. This study confirms that bandwidth measurements can be used as an integral experimental component to study the effect of the secondary structure of peptidic solutes on their RP-HPLC retention behavior. Further, the data demonstrate the utility of RP-HPLC as a tool to examine peptide conformational dynamics at hydrophobic surfaces. The relevance of these results to the general phenomenon of peptide-lipid interactions is discussed in terms of the associated evidence for lipid-induced changes in the conformation of these three bioactive peptides.