Philipp Jochems

The building blocks of peptides and proteins, amino acids, are present in animals, humans, and plants. The analysis of amino acids is of essential significance in several areas including food science, clinical diagnostics, and pharmaceutical products research. Classical liquid chromatography (LC) determination of amino acids is performed with sample pretreatment including pre-column as well as post-column derivatization to improve or enable spectroscopic detection.

A simple, rapid, and robust ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of natural and artificial vanilla flavouring substances as well as some precursors has been developed using an automated method scouting or method optimization workflow. The most suitable mobile phase and stationary phase combination was identified in a scouting run. These conditions were used to create a two-dimensional model in computer simulation software. Temperature and gradient time were varied to establish the optimum fast and robust separation conditions. This approach resulted in a 5.5 min gradient method that allowed for fast screening of 11 compounds of interest.