Retention Indices As the Best Reproducible Chromatographic Parameters for the Characterization of Phenolic Compounds in Reversed-Phase High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

A comparison of various methods for presenting the retention parameters of analyzed compounds in reversed-phase HPLC under the conditions of stepwise gradient elution demonstrated that retention indices (RIs) based on a standard scale of n-alkyl phenyl ketones exhibited the best reproducibility. However, a new procedure for calculating extrapolated RI values under these conditions should be developed for determining the RIs of the most hydrophilic compounds, which are eluted from a column before a reference component (acetophenone). With this procedure, the RIs of more than 40 phenolic and polyphenolic compounds were determined. The addition of spectroscopic characteristics to these RIs was responsible for the reliable identification of the above compounds in complex mixtures of extractive substances of plant origin.__________Translated from Zhurnal Analiticheskoi Khimii, Vol. 60, No. 7, 2005, pp. 734–746.Original Russian Text Copyright © 2005 by Zenkevich, Kochetova, Larionov, Revina.