Separation performance of polydopamine-based cucurbit[7]uril stationary phase for capillary gas chromatography

Polydopamine(PDA) coating, a nature-inspired polymer, has attracted great attention in many areas due to its high adhesion strength and stability on almost all types of substrate surfaces. This work presents the first example of using PDA coating as a column pretreatment method in capillary gas chromatography(GC) and its employment in the column fabrication of cucurbit[7]uril(CB7) stationary phase. The fabricated PDA-CB7 column exhibited weakly polar nature and had advantages over CB7 column without PDA for the separations of some critical analytes in GC. This work demonstrates the advantage and potential of using PDA as a facile column pretreatment method in capillary GC column fabrication.