Complementary enantioselectivity profiles of chiral cinchonan carbamate selectors with distinct carbamate residues and their implementation in enantioselective two-dimensional high-performance liquid chromatography of amino acids.

A cardinal requirement for effective 2D-HPLC separations is sufficient complementarity in the retention profiles of first and second dimension separations. It is shown that retention and enantioselectivity of chiral selectors derived from cinchona alkaloids can be conveniently modulated by structural variation of the carbamate residue of the quinine/quinidine carbamate ligand of such chiral stationary phases (CSP). A variety of aliphatic and aromatic residues have been tested in comparison to non-carbamoylated quinine CSP. Various measures of orthogonality have been utilized to derive the CSP that is most complementary to the tert-butylcarbamoylated quinine CSP (tBuCQN CSP), which is commercially available as Chiralpak QN-AX column. It turned out that O-9-(2,6-diisopropylphenylcarbamoyl)-modified quinine is most promising in this respect. Its implementation as a complementary CSP for the separation of amino acids derivatized with Sanger's reagent (2,4-dinitrophenylated amino acids) in the first dimension combined with a tBuCQN CSP in the second dimension revealed successful enantiomer separations in a comprehensive chiral×chiral 2D-HPLC setup. However, the degree of complementarity could be greatly enhanced when simultaneously the absolute configurations were exchanged from quinine to quinidine in the chiral selector of the first dimension separation resulting in opposite elution orders of the enantiomers in the two dimensions. The advantage of such a chiral×chiral over achiral×chiral 2D-HPLC setup, amongst others, is the perfect compatibility of the mobile phase because in both dimensions the identical eluent can be used.

Surface-anchored counterions on weak chiral anion-exchangers accelerate separations and improve their compatibility for mass-spectrometry-hyphenation.

In the present work we propose new variants of chiral stationary phases (CSP) with tert-butylcarbamoylquinine (tBuCQN) as chiral selector molecule. Four tBuCQN-CSPs with distinct bonding chemistries are compared in terms of their pH-dependent surface charge by ζ-potential determinations, by achiral and chiral liquid chromatographic tests and LC-ESI-MS hyphenation. In one embodiment tBuCQN was immobilized on 3-mercaptopropylmethylsilyl-modified silica by thiol-ene click reaction (brush type CSP with selector coverage of 0.38mmol/g). In another embodiment, poly-(3-mercaptopropyl)-methylsiloxane was coated onto vinylized silica particles in presence of tBuCQN and radical initiator. The tBuCQN selector was then immobilized onto the polysiloxane film which in turn was crosslinked to the vinyl-surface in a simultaneous double click reaction leading to a CSP with enhanced stability due to multiple linkages (0.29mmol/g tBuCQN). Aliquots of each of the two CSPs were further modified by oxidation of free residual thiol groups to sulfonic acid functionalities to obtain strongly acidic endcapping groups which act as immobilized counterions of the chiral WAX CSPs (0.2mmol/g sulfonic acid co-ligands for brush type CSP). This caused secondary repulsive interactions, hence balanced interactions of the target analytes (chiral acids) at the WAX site and decreased non-specific interactions. Furthermore, this rendered possible the use of milder elution conditions, i.e. lower ionic strength, for acidic compounds. Separation performance was maintained and slightly improved, respectively, when using polar organic or reversed-phase type elution mode in chiral separations which were significantly accelerated (isoeluotropic conditions could be achieved with ca. factor 40 lower counterion concentration in the mobile phase). Thus, LC-ESI-MS enantiomer separations could be readily performed at very low ionic strength conditions (10mM acetate) which is favorable due to less ion suppression. In addition to this the newly developed stationary phases showed complementary retention profiles in RP- and HILIC-mode which make these type of stationary phases also promising tools for achiral applications in pharmaceutical analysis, especially as orthogonal separation principle e.g. in 2D-LC and impurity profiling.