Utility of Cationic and Anionic Chiral Surfactants in Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) and CE Coupled to Mass Spectrometry (CE-MS)

Book excerpt: The research presented in this thesis involves the application of chiral cationic and anionic surfactants for simultaneous enantioseparation of structurally similar compounds in capillary electrophoresis (CE) and CE coupled to mass spectrometry (CE-MS). The first chapter briefly introduces the fundamentals of CE and CE-MS, emphasizing the micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC) and MEKC-MS techniques, as well as ionic liquids (ILs) and affinity CE (ACE). In chapter 2, a mixture of five racemic profen (PROF) drugs are simultaneously separated with the combined use of 2,3,6-tri-O-methyl-[beta]-cyclodextrin (TM-[beta]-CD) and IL-type surfactant, N-undecenoxycarbonyl-L-leucinol bromide (L-UCLB). Enantioseparations of these PROFs are optimized using a standard recipe containing 35.00 mM TM-[beta]-CD, 5.00 mM sodium acetate at pH 5.0, and varying the concentration as well as chain length of the IL surfactants. The batch-to-batch reproducibility of L-UCLB is found to be acceptable in terms of enantiomeric resolution, and migration time. A competitive inhibition mechanism is proposed to investigate the ternary interactions among TM-[beta]-CD, ILs, and PROFs. The apparent binding constant of TM-[beta]-CD to L-UCLB is estimated by nonlinear and linear plotting methods. The binding constants of one representative PROF (e.g., fenoprofen) to TM-[beta]-CD and to L-UCLB are estimated by a secondary plotting approach. The R- and S-fenoprofen having different binding constant values, resulting in the enantioseparation due to the synergistic effect of TM-[beta]-CD and L-UCLB. The R- and S-configurations of barbiturates display differences in potency and biological activity. In Chapter 3, a multivariate MEKC-ESI-MS approach for the simultaneous analysis of the racemic mixture of three barbiturates is presented. The chiral selector employed is the polymeric surfactant polysodium N-undecenoxycarbonyl-L-isoleucinate. The central composite design is used to optimize the chiral resolution, decrease the total analysis time, and improve the ESI-MS signal-to-noise ratio for these barbiturates. In preliminary experiments, the ranges of the factors investigated in the multivariate approaches are determined. Then the multivariate optimizations are conducted to determine the best overall chiral resolution with shortest possible run times for barbiturates. The limit of detection of ESI-MS is several folds higher compared to the UV detection. The predicted optimum results are in good agreement with the experimental data.