Supercritical fluid chromatography versus high performance liquid chromatography for enantiomeric and diastereoisomeric separations on coated polysaccharides-based stationary phases: Application to dihydropyridone derivatives.

For analytical applications, SFC has always remained in the shadow of LC. Analytical enantioseparation of eight dihydropyridone derivatives, was run in both High Performance Liquid Chromatography and Supercritical Fluid Chromatography. Four polysaccharide based chiral stationary phases namely amylose and cellulose tris(3, 5-dimethylphenylcarbamate), amylose tris((S)-α-phenylethylcarbamate) and cellulose tris(4-methylbenzoate) with four mobile phases consisted of either n-hexane/ethanol or propan-2-ol (80:20 v:v) or carbon dioxide/ethanol or propan-2-ol (80:20 v:v) mixtures were investigated under same operatory conditions (temperature and flow-rate). The elution strength, enantioselectivity and resolution were compared in the two methodologies. For these compounds, for most of the conditions, HPLC afforded shorter retention times and a higher resolution than SFC. HPLC appears particularly suitable for the separation of the compounds bearing two chiral centers. For instance compound 7 was baseline resolved on OD-H CSP under n-Hex/EtOH 80/20, with resolution values equal to 2.98, 1.55, 4.52, between the four stereoisomers in less than 17 min, whereas in SFC, this latter is not fully separated in 23 min under similar eluting conditions. After analytical screenings, the best conditions were transposed to semi-preparative scale.