Theory and practice of size exclusion chromatography for the analysis of protein aggregates

Abstract Size exclusion chromatography (SEC) is a historical technique widely employed for the detailed characterization of therapeutic proteins and can be considered as a reference and powerful technique for the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of aggregates. The main advantage of this approach is the mild mobile phase conditions that permit the characterization of proteins with minimal impact on the conformational structure and local environment. Despite the fact that the chromatographic behavior and peak shape are hardly predictable in SEC, some generic rules can be applied for SEC method development, which are described in this review. During recent years, some improvements were introduced to conventional SEC that will also be discussed. Of these new SEC characteristics, we discuss (i) the commercialization of shorter and narrower columns packed with reduced particle sizes allowing an improvement in the resolution and throughput; (ii) the possibility of combining SEC with various detectors, including refractive index (RI), ultraviolet (UV), multi-angle laser light scattering (MALLS) and viscometer (IV), for extensive characterization of protein samples and (iii) the possibility of hyphenating SEC with mass spectrometry (MS) detectors using an adapted mobile phase containing a small proportion of organic modifiers and ion-pairing reagents.