Applications of Hyphenated Liquid Chromatography Techniques for Polymer Analysis

We find polymers everywhere in our daily activities, for example, as a part of consumer electronics products, healthcare devices, vehicles, etc. Analytical characterization of such materials is an important step towards understanding their properties and behavior in various applications. The increase of material complexity driven by highly demanding requirements for many applications necessitates the use of sophisticated analytical techniques to obtain sufficient insight into the structure of these materials. Coupling of liquid chromatography with other information-rich instrumental techniques becomes more and more important in the field of polymer characterization. Such combination can enable simultaneous separation, identification, and quantification of polymer sample components. In addition, it can provide information on interdependence of two polymer properties, e.g., molecular weight and chemical composition. Different hyphenated systems may be applied to address different problems in polymer research and development and a selection of the right technique may not be an easy and straightforward task. In this paper, the applications of LC-NMR, LC-IR, LC-Raman, LC-MS, LC-MALDI, LC × LC, and LC × Py-GC for polymer analysis are reviewed, their advantages and limitations are discussed, and practical challenges for the implementation of these techniques in a lab are addressed. Different hyphenated options are compared to facilitate selection of a suitable instrument for the particular problem at hand.     

Analysis of Glycocholic Acid in Human Plasma and Urine from Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients

Glycocholic acid (GCA) has been identified as endogenous biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). To dissolve protein and liberate GCA from protein, ionic liquids (ILs) that contain chaotropic ions were used for pretreatment of liquid biological samples. Coupling with solid-phase extraction (SPE) and reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC), the novel sample pretreatment method was applied for quantitative determination of GCA in urine and plasma samples. Compared with the traditional organic solvents pretreatment of biological samples, the proposed method is “greener” and simpler, due to no use of volatile organic solvent, and avoiding centrifugation. Under the optimal conditions, when the GCA-free urine and plasma samples were spiked with GCA at 0.05–1.0 and 0.2–10 μmol L^?1, the recoveries of GCA ranged between 95.8–101.6 and 96.9–100.4%, respectively. These procedures only required 1 mL of urine and 3 mL of 3 mM ILs aqueous solution and 100 μL of plasma and 4 mL of 2 mM ILs aqueous solution, respectively. The proposed method has been successfully validated on a small sample size of 14 HCC patients and 14 healthy volunteers. For HCC patients, the mean concentration of GCA was 24.79 ± 6.86 and 31.98 ± 11.12 μmol L^?1 in urine and plasma samples, and was about 3 times and 24 times as much as in healthy people, respectively. The proposed method opens up a new possibility in early diagnosis of HCC.     

Development and Validation of a Stability-Indicating LC Method for Determination of Bexarotene in Softgel Dosage Formulation

This study focuses on a novel liquid chromatographic approach that has been developed and approved for the quantitative determination of bexarotene (BXT), its potential impurities in drug substances and drug products. Chromatographic separation was developed on a Symmetry C₈ (150 × 4.6) mm 5-µm column with a mobile phase containing an isocratic mixture of acetonitrile:DI water:glacial acetic acid (650:350:7.5) v/v/v at a flow rate of 1.2 mL min^?1, and quantitation was carried out using ultraviolet detection at 262 nm for BXT and 290 nm for BHA with a column temperature of 35 °C. The resolution among butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), BXT and its process-related impurity-A was found to be greater than 5. Regression analysis confers an R value (correlation coefficient) higher than 0.998 for BHA, BXT and impurity-A. The detection level for BXT impurities was found at a level below 0.03% (0.18 µg mL^?1). The inter- and intra-day precisions for BHA, BXT and impurities were evaluated and found to have a %RSD of less than 3.0.