High performance liquid chromatography - Quantitative nuclear magnetic resonance - High performance liquid chromatography for purity measurement of human insulin

Quantitative Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (qNMR) is a reliable quantitative spectroscopic technique, wherein the intensity of a resonance line is directly proportional to the number of resonant nucleus, and the absolute content of the compound can be determined, this means the inorganic stabilizer in the sample would not affect the result of qNMR. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a common analytical method with a high separation capacity. This study combined HPLC and qNMR, to measure the purity of Human Insulin (HI). It started from an original HI. The first step is purifying the original HI by HPLC to get a purified HI, with organic purity of 99.78%. The second step is assessing the absolute content of the purified HI by qNMR, and got 40.25%. The third step is measuring the purity of original HI by HPLC again, using the purified HI as the reference material. This method, called HPLC-qNMR-HPLC, is more accurate (84.12%?±?1.14%) than the traditional IDMS (isotope dilution mass spectrometry) method (86.6%?±?3.4%). This study expanded the application of qNMR to proteins with molecular weight of about 5800, and showed that this method can be widely used in measuring the purity of macromolecular proteins.