Chromatography Forum

Dear colleagues!

I would like to ask you for advice. In the lab We have a couple of ion-exchange columns of Mono-type (i.e. Mono-Q and MonoS) that were purchased a long time ago. These columns were seriously misused and neglected. I discovered that medium in these columns is partially dried, there are dark circles or darkened areas on beads. Thus I have following questions:
1) Is it possible to bring these columns “back to life” (as we cannot buy new and I would like to have these for my experimental work)?
2) How these should be sanitized? Are there any special tricks other than procedure described at “GE” web-page?
3) How to make darkened beads white again? How the color change influence the resolution properties of medium?
I would be grateful if anybody could give me an answer to these questions.

My answers are:
1) it is possible, depending of the resin status
2) just follow the cleaning procedure of the manufacturer
3) colour does not effect the resolution, to make it white is not possible.

Good luck

try running a high salt buffer (1-2 M) through it at low flowrate in the reverse direction

Dear Gerhard,

Thank You very much for your reply. I want to invest some time and effort in order to restore these things. It is really a disaster when equipment that costs thousands of euro is almost destroyed by people's carelessness.