Determination of Sulfonamides in Pharmaceuticals and Rabbit Plasma by Microchip Electrophoresis with LED-IF Detection

In this paper, we describe a compact and low-cost light-emitting diode-induced fluorescence (LED-IF) detection coupled to microchip electrophoresis for the determination of sulfonamides in pharmaceutical formulations and rabbit plasma. Three fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled sulfonamides in rabbit plasma were separated in the running buffer of 40 mM phosphate buffer (pH 7.0) at the separation voltage of 2.0 kV, and detected by LED-IF detector in which the high-power blue LED was driven at the constant current of 150 mA and the emitted fluorescence over 510 nm was collected by a planar photodiode. The linear concentration ranged from 2.0 to 125.0 μg mL⁻¹, both for sulfadiazine and sulfamethazine with the correlation coefficients (r ²) of 0.995 and 0.997, respectively, and from 2.0 to 100.0 μg mL⁻¹ with the correlation coefficients (r ²) of 0.997 for sulfaguanidine. The limits of detection for the three sulfonamides were 0.36–0.50 μg mL⁻¹ (S/N = 3). Intra-day and inter-day precision of migration time and peak area for the determination of sulfonamides were <4.5 %. This method has been successfully applied to the analysis of sulfonamides in pharmaceuticals, and could be used to study the pharmacokinetics of sulfonamides in rabbit.