RESUMO
To improve the efficiency of drug-discovery research on pyrrole-imidazole polyamides (PIs), a more rapid method for quantitative and qualitative measurement of PI in rat plasma samples was developed here using ultra-fast liquid chromatography-ultraviolet spectrometry (UFLC-UV) in order to shorten the measurement time. A measurement method of PIs by HPLC developed until now takes 45 min for one sample measurement. This method was inefficient to investigate extraction conditions from biological samples and measurement of animal experimental samples. In the developed method of this study, PI and phenacetin (internal standard, IS) were separated with an ACQUITY UPLC HSS T3 (1.8 µm, 2.1 × 50 mm; Nihon Waters K.K., Japan) column using a mobile phase of 0.1% acetic acid (mobile phase A) and acetonitrile (mobile phase B) at a flow rate of 0.3 mL/min with a linear gradient. The detection wavelength was 310 nm. The calibration curve was linear in the range of 0.225-4.5 µg/mL (correlation coefficients ≥0.9995, n = 5). The intra- and inter-day accuracies were in the range of -6.04 to 12.2%, and the precision was less than 2.99%. The measurement time of this method (7 min per injection) was markedly shortened to about one-sixth of the previous measurement time (45 min per injection). This is the first report describing the quantitative and qualitative measurement of PI in plasma using UFLC-UV. The present method will be very useful for the drug-discovery research of PIs.