A team of scientists from Nanjing, China, have created a low-cost efficient online derivatization system, which they used to detect mono- and oligo-saccharides using a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-ultraviolet (UV) detector system. Their work was recently published in the Journal of Separation Science (1).
This method uses phenylhydrazine as the derivatization reagent, meaning it was directly spiked in the mobile phase to allow for the separation and detection of mono- and oligosaccharides in the HPLC-UV system. Further, the method’s online derivatization design significantly reduced the likelihood of analysts being harmed of derivatization reagents (1). Chromatographic parameters were optimized using the Box-Behnken design strategy, which is a quadratic design that lacks an embedded factorial design (2).
After conducting different experiments, the proposed method showed satisfactory results. The linear ranges held acceptable correlation coefficients (R2 > 0.99), accuracy (Recovery: 95.3%–105.6%), high intra-day precision (relative standard deviation [RSD]: 1.4%–7.1%) and inter-day precision (RSD: 2.0%–7.4%). Meanwhile, the recovery values were in the ranges of 95.0%–104.6% and 95.1%–104.8% for robustness and ruggedness, respectively. These results encouraged the scientists’ belief in the applicability and reliability of the proposed method, showing potential for analyzing saccharides in complex real-world samples.
(1) Jiang, Z.; Wang, H.; Yu, M.; Qu, C.; Yue, W.; Wu, Q. A low-cost efficient online derivatization system for the determination of saccharides by high-performance liquid chromatograph-ultraviolet detector. J. Sep. Sci. 2023, 46 (20), 2300384. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jssc.202300384
(2) Box-Behnken Designs. NIST 2023. https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/pri/section3/pri3362.htm#(accessed 2023-10-30)
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