Highly sensitive chiral analysis in capillary electrophoresis with large-volume sample stacking with an electroosmotic flow pump

To improve the sensitivity in chiral analysis by capillary electrophoresis without loss of optical resolution, application of large-volume sample stacking with an electroosmotic flow pump (LVSEP) was investigated. Effects of the addition of cyclodextrin (CD) into a running solution on the LVSEP preconcentration was theoretically studied, where the preconcentration efficiency and effective separation length would be slightly increased if the effective electrophoretic velocity (vep,eff,BGS) of the analytes was decreased by interacting with CD. In LVSEP-CD-modified capillary zone electrophoresis (CDCZE) and LVSEP-CD electrokinetic chromatography with reduced vep,eff,BGS, up to 1000-fold sensitivity increases were achieved with almost no loss of resolution. In LVSEP-CD-modified micellar electrokinetic chromatography of amino acids with increased vep,eff,BGS, a 1300-fold sensitivity increase was achieved without much loss of resolution, indicating the versatile applicability of LVSEP to many separation modes. An enantio-excess (EE) assay was also carried out in LVSEP-CDCZE, resulting in successful analyses of up to 99.6% EE. Finally, we analyzed ibuprofen in urine by desalting with a C18 solid-phase extraction column. As a typical result, 250 ppb ibuprofen was well concentrated and optically resolved with 84.0–86.6% recovery in LVSEP-CDCZE, indicating the applicability of LVSEP to real samples containing a large amount of unnecessary background salts.

► Novel application of LVSEP to three chiral separation modes in CE.
► Up to 1300-fold sensitivity increases without losing optical resolution.
► 99.6% EE assay of ibuprofen without optimizing preconcentration condition.
► Successful analysis of urine sample with C18 SPE purification.
► LVSEP was proved to be useful for high performance chiral analysis in CE.