Gel permeation properties of cellulose. I. Preliminary comparison of unmodified and crosslinked, decrystallized cotton cellulose

Decrystallized cotton cellulose was found to be have gel permeation properties comparable to those of the highly crosslinked dextran and polyacrylamide gels used in chromatography. Partial separations of pairs of sugars, ranging in molecular weight from 120 to 738, were studied by determining the optical rotations of fractions eluted from chromatographic columns, employing a sensitive automatic polarimeter. The elution volumes of individual sugars of known molecular weights provide a quantitative measure of changes produced in the cellulose polymer structure by crosslinking. A significant difference was found between unmodified cellulose and the same material crosslinked by formaldehyde treatment; although crosslinking reduced permeability to larger molecules, the crosslinked material was found to be more permeable than the untreated cellulose to compounds having molecular weights below approximately 1000.