New Advances and Applications in Field-Flow Fractionation.

Field-flow fractionation (FFF) is a family of techniques that was created especially for separating and characterizing macromolecules, nanoparticles, and micrometer-sized analytes. It is coming of age as new nanomaterials, polymers, composites, and biohybrids with remarkable properties are introduced and new analytical challenges arise due to synthesis heterogeneities and the motivation to correlate analyte properties with observed performance. Appreciation of the complexity of biological, pharmaceutical, and food systems and the need to monitor multiple components across many size scales have also contributed to FFF's growth. This review highlights recent advances in FFF capabilities, instrumentation, and applications that feature the unique characteristics of different FFF techniques in determining a variety of information, such as averages and distributions in size, composition, shape, architecture, and microstructure and in investigating transformations and function.

Moving towards fast characterization of polymorphic drugs by solid-state NMR spectroscopy.

Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (SS-NMR) spectroscopy has become a common technique to study polymorphism in pharmaceutical solids at high-resolution. However, high-throughput application of high resolution SS-NMR spectroscopy is severely limited by the long 1H spin-lattice relaxation (T1) that is common to solid phase compounds. Here, we demonstrate the use of paramagnetic relaxation reagents such as chromium (III) acetylacetonate (Cr(acac)3) and nickel (II) acetylacetonate (Ni(acac)2) for fast data acquisition by significantly reducing the T1 value for carbamazepine Forms I, II, III, and dihydrate, cimetidine Forms A and B, nabumetone Form I, and acetaminophen Form I polymorphs. High resolution 13C cross-polarization and magic angle spinning were used to measure T1 values for each polymorph. In order to confirm the absence of polymorphic transitions during SS-NMR experiments, powder x-ray diffraction was implemented. The amount of chromium ions incorporated by the recrystallization process was quantified by using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy. Our results suggest that the paramagnetic ions added to the polymorphs do not affect the polymorphic transformation or the quality of NMR spectra. We believe that this successful demonstration of fast data collection will enable high-throughput utilization of SS-NMR techniques to study polymorphic solids and could set the groundwork for NMR crystallography studies.