Chiral Separation of Amines by Non-Aqueous Capillary Electrophoresis using Low Molecular Weight Selectors

Three chiral selectors (diketogulonic acid, benzoxycarbonylglycylproline and ketopinic acid) have been introduced for enantioseparation of pharmacologically active amines in non-aqueous capillary electrophoresis. The use of organic solvents, instead of aqueous buffers in the background electrolyte facilitated ion-pair formation between the analytes and the chiral selectors. The enantioresolution was strongly affected by the choice of selector and organic solvent but also depended on the other electrolytes. The most important parameter for the enantioresolution, apart from the choice of chiral selector, was the direction and magnitude of the electro-osmosis. Thus, covalently coated capillaries were used to suppress and to reverse this flow. Furthermore, the alkali metal hydroxide added to the background electrolyte had a great influence on the electro-osmosis. Exchanging LiOH for NaOH, was found to decrease the electro-osmotic flow. Interestingly, the flow was altered from cathodic to anodic, with KOH, RbOH or CsOH added to the ethanolic BGE. The occurrence of a reversed electro-osmosis had a great positive effect on the enantioresolution. An appropriate choice of solvent and electrolytes promoted also fast chiral separations, e.g., the enantiomers of isoprenaline were resolved within one minute. The capillary electrophoresis systems developed within this work were applied for enantiomeric purity determinations of different pharmaceutical forms of drug products. A detection limit of 0.033 % was achieved for 1S,2R-ephedrine, the enantiomeric impurity in Efedrin®, when diketogulonic acid was used as the selector. By using the pre-concentration technique, transient isotachophoresis, the peak efficiency was enhanced for the enantiomers of timolol. This facilitated the introduction of a higher concentration of the sample into the capillary electrophoretic system containing ketopinic acid as the selector, and lowered the detection limit from 2.5 % to 0.2 % for the enantiomeric impurity R-timolol compared with injection without transient isotachophoresis. The volatility of the non-aqueous media in capillary electrophoresis facilitated the hyphenation to mass spectrometry. The partial filling technique ensured that the selector did not contaminate the mass spectrometer, and the separated enantiomers of e.g., pronethalol were detected in the selector-free zone