General screening and optimization strategy for fast chiral separations in modern supercritical fluid chromatography

•General screening approach for fast SFC chiral separation was developed.•The best enantioselectivity in SFC was obtained with tris(3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) substituted stationary phases based on both amylose and cellulose.•Combined additive composed of 0.1% DEA and 0.1% TFA provided the best enantioselectivity for generic screening.•Volatile buffers were found to be a viable option for SFC chiral screening.•Tetrahydrofuran was the most convenient injection solvent for chiral SFC analyses.

High throughput general chiral screening method using supercritical fluid chromatography was developed. This method takes an advantage of very fast gradient screening (3 min + 1 min isocratic hold) and generic enantioselectivity of the combined additive formed by 0.1% trifluoroacetic (TFA) acid and 0.1% diethylamine (DEA). The TFA/DEA combined additive was systematically added to organic modifiers methanol and isopropanol. Among five tested polysaccharide-based chiral stationary phases, amylose tris(3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) and cellulose tris(3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) provided the best enantioseparation success rate. Therefore, the proposed initial first-line screening includes four experiments using these two stationary phases and the above mentioned two combinations: CO2/methanol and CO2/isopropanol + the combined additive. If these stationary phases fail in the screening step, cellulose tris(3-chloro-4-methylphenylcarbamate) and cellulose tris(3,5-dichlorophenylcarbamate) can be proposed for the screening in the second line.For further optimization in case of insufficient resolution obtained in the screening phase fine tuning of temperature, BPR pressure and gradient slope was tested with unsuccessful results. An improvement of enantioselectivity was obtained only when gradient elution was replaced by isocratic elution with substantially lower amount of organic modifier, when changing the concentration of the additive or when using combined organic modifier, such as methanol/acetonitrile (1:1). Finally, to enable the MS compatibility, also volatile additives including ammonium formate and ammonium acetate were tested. The results were more encouraging than expected. Volatile buffers thus make an interesting option in chiral SFC screening methods, however, at the cost of somewhat lower enantioselectivity.

Graphical abstractDownload high-res image (124KB)Download full-size image