Capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry for impurity profiling of basic pharmaceuticals using non-volatile background electrolytes

A generic approach has been developed for coupling capillary electrophoresis (CE) using non-volatile background electrolytes (BGEs) with mass spectrometry (MS) using a sheath liquid interface. CE-MS has been applied for basic and bi-functional compounds using a BGE consisting of 100 mM of TRIS adjusted to pH 2.5 using phosphoric acid. A liquid sheath effect is observed which may influence the CZE separation and hence may complicate the correlation between CE-UV and CE-MS methods. The influence of the liquid sheath effect on the migration behavior of basic pharmaceuticals has been studied by simulation experiments, in which the BGE outlet vial is replaced by sheath liquid in a CE-UV experiment. As a consequence of the liquid sheath effect, phosphate based BGEs can be used without significant loss of MS sensitivity compared to volatile BGEs. The use of buffer constituents such as TRIS can lead to lower detection limits as loss of MS sensitivity can be compensated by better CE performance. TRIS based BGEs permit relatively high injection amounts of about 100 pmol while maintaining high resolution. The ESI-MS parameters were optimized for a generic method with maximum sensitivity and stable operation, in which the composition of the sheath liquid and the position of the capillary were found to be important. Furthermore, the nebulizing pressure strongly influenced the separation efficiency. The system showed stable performance for several days and a reproducibility of about 15% RSD in peak area has been obtained. Nearly all test compounds used in this study could be analyzed with an MS detection limit of 0.05% measured in scan mode using extracted ion chromatograms. As a result, CE-MS was found to be a valuable analytical tool for pharmaceutical impurity profiling.