High performance liquid chromatography for the determination of glucosamine sulfate in human plasma after derivatization with 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate

In this study, we developed a simple, rapid, sensitive, and reliable method for the determination of glucosamine sulfate in human plasma, which was based on derivatization with 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOC-Cl) followed by reverse-phase HPLC-FLD. For the first time, FMOC-Cl was introduced into derivatization of glucosamine sulfate in human plasma. The amino groups of glucosamine sulfate and vertilmicin sulfate (the internal standard) were trapped with FMOC-Cl to form glucosamine-FMOC-Cl and vertilmicin-FMOC-Cl adducts, which can be very suitable for HPLC-FLD. Precipitation of plasma proteins by acetonitrile was followed by vortex mixing and centrifugation. Chromatographic separation was performed on a C18 column (DIAMONSIL 150 x 4 mm id, 5 microm) with a mobile phase gradient consisting of acetonitrile and water at a flow-rate of 1 mL/min. The retention times of glucosamine-FMOC-Cl and vertilmicin-FMOC-Cl adducts were 8.9 and 21.2 min, respectively. This method was shown to be selective and sensitive for glucosamine sulfate. The limit of detection was 15 ng/mL for glucosamine sulfate in plasma and the linear range was 0.1-10 mg/mL in plasma with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.9999. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) of intra-day and inter-day assays were 5.2-8.1% and 6.1- 8.5%, respectively. Extraction recoveries of glucosamine sulfate in plasma were greater than 90%. The validated method was successfully applied to the determination of glucosamine sulfate in human plasma samples.