idea for an injector program, not sure if feasible

[forbiddendonut]

Hey,
I am currently running an HPLC assay that requires a somewhat extensive sample preparation. This involves diluting up to 96 protein solutions at different concentrations to a concentration of 1 mg/mL with reducing buffer, letting the mixtures sit for 20 mins and react, then loading them onto an Agilent 1100/1200 for assay. I was thinking that I could maybe automate the whole sample prep. routine using an injector program in ChemStation.

I'm hoping I would be able to make a program that would draw from a vial of the reducing buffer and dispense and mix it into each sample vial to achieve 1 mg/mL, allow the solution to react for 20 mins, then inject the sample into the column.

Issues I see occurring with this are that I'm not sure I can tell ChemStation to deliver different buffer volumes to each vial through the injector program, and I don't know if I could get the cycles to overlap to minimize hold times for the samples.

Does anyone with experience in this know if this is feasible?

Thanks.

[James_Ball]

I don't think you can dispense back into a vial, but then I have never tried it with an 1100/1200 autosampler.

Agilent does make the prep station auto sampler for the GC systems that does similar things, I wonder if they have a way to adapt it to do prep work for the LC systems? You may want to contact Agilent to see if that is an option.

[forbiddendonut]

James,
Thanks for the reply. I had a look at the Agilent Workbench sample prep device and It looks pretty handy. I've emailed our Agilent rep and asked if they could bring a demo.

[James_Ball]

We just had one if the new Flex autosamplers from EST installed, it is a beta unit but it does have the capability to do sample prep work. We are doing some testing on how it works currently. It looks like it will be a very nice system for such things.