Study on enantiomeric separation of basic drugs by NACE in methanol-based medium using erythromycin lactobionate as a chiral selector.

A wide variety of chiral selectors have been employed in CZE, and among them macrocyclic antibiotics including glycopeptides, ansamycins, aminoglycosides and polypeptides exhibited prominent enantioselective properties toward abundant racemic compounds. Compared with CZE, the use of macrocyclic antibiotics as chiral selectors in NACE has not been reported previously. In this study, an approach to the enantioseparation of basic drugs by means of NACE with erythromycin lactobionate (EL) belonging to the group of macrolide antibiotics has been investigated. Especially different from the above four classes of antibiotics, there are no reports concerned with the use of macrolides which belong to macrocyclic antibiotics as chiral selectors in CE. In this work EL is first used as a chiral selector in NACE for the enantiomeric separations of two racemic basic drugs that possess high separability consisting of propranolol and duloxetine. Furthermore, EL possesses advantages such as high solubility and low viscosity in the solvent and very weak UV absorption. The chiral separations were achieved using Tris-boric acid as the BGE and methanol as the organic medium. In the course of this work we observed that both migration time and enantioseparation were influenced by several parameters such as the pH and composition of the BGE, EL concentration, capillary temperature and applied voltage. Consequently, these parameters were systematically optimized in order to obtain the optimum enantioseparations.