Advanced dress-up chiral columns: New removable chiral stationary phases for enantioseparation of chiral carboxylic acids

This paper describes the preparation of new dress-up columns featuring reproducibly removable and replaceable chiral stationary phases. After synthesizing perfluroalkylated quinine and quinidine derivatives as chiral stationary phase compounds (F-CSPs), we adsorbed them reversibly onto a fluorous LC column through pumping of their solutions. Using this dress-up chiral column and fluorophobic elution of aqueous ammonium formate/MeOH mixtures, we could enantioseparate four racemic N-acetyl amino acids, dichlorprop, and sixteen fluorescent 6-aminoquinolyl-N-hydroxysuccinimidyl carbamate (AQC)-derivatized amino acids. Dressing and undressing of the coated F-CSPs could be controlled by varying the fluorophilicity and fluorophobicity of the eluent. The relative standard deviations of the retention times, the retention factors, the number of theoretical plates, the enantioseparation factors, and the resolutions of each of four preparations of such dress-up columns were all less than or equal to 5.26% (from 20 repeated analyses); the reproducibilities from four different preparations were all less than or equal to 10.6%. These columns also facilitated highly sensitive and selective analyses of AQC-amino acids when detected using LC–MS/MS.