I'm still at this awesome LC bootcamp. Yesterday the instructors threw out this idea that has never ever occurred to me. If you have a dual pump system with enough valves, you can set up parallel LC. Dionex actually just sells a kit for this. The gist of the method is that while your peptides are eluting, the second sample is loaded onto a second trapping column and washed. When you get past the point in your gradient where you are just washing crap off your column and re-equilibrating you switch valves and then go right into the elution of the next set of peptides! You could be really ruthless with this and shave a ton of time off of each run or more conservative and still shave a lot of time!
In the example we were looking at we were able to shave off 30 minutes of trapping, desalting and equilibrating time from each sample injected. Imagine a semi-complex sample that you run with a 140 peptide elution time and you are talking about close to 6 hours of extra run time that you are squeezing in a day. (Assuming ~12 samples per day and 30 minutes each). Thats 2-3 extra runs per day!
Looking at the schematic makes this seem reasonably simple for any LC that has 2 switching valves and separate loading pumps. Might be a great solution for any of you guys who are juts getting buried under your sample queue!
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