Optimization strategies and modeling of separations of dansyl-amino, acids by cyclodextrin-modified capillary electrophoresis

Presented in this study is an approach to optimize conditions for capillary electrophoresis separations of multianalyte enantiomeric pairs (D- and L-dansyl (Dns)-amino acids) that involves the rational use of combinations of cyclodextrins (CDs) as enantioselective running buffer additives. Migration data is experimentally obtained for a range of concentrations for native CDs used individually and employed to determine inclusion constants for the Dns-amino acids of interest. An expression for the mobility of the amino acids when multiple (two in this work) CDs are present in the running buffer is used to simulate separations for more complex CD systems. A chromatographic response function involving predicted resolution is generated to gauge the quality of these separations. Simplex methods are then employed for the first time to optimize conditions for the separation of amino acid enantiomers. The validity of this approach is demonstrated for separations of five Dns-amino acid enantiomers using γ- and β-CDs at various concentrations. Extending the dual-CD approach to other CDs and increasing the number of CDs beyond two should be possible. To this end, preliminary experiments are performed by using several available single-isomer, derivatized CDs (individually) to determine if they have potential for further studies. Although results with these particular derivatized CDs are not encouraging, we did find that molecular mechanics modeling is useful in interpreting those cases in which low inclusion constants possibly contributed to the ineffectiveness of the CDs.