CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Harmala alkaloids (HAlks) are a family of compounds with psychotropic effects on humans. Its presence in invasive algae on atlantic coast of the patagonian sea would result in economical benefits. Very low concentrations or absence of HAlks becomes these algae eatable and with potential uses in food industry. On the other hand, significant concentration of HAlks becomes the algae not eatable, but the possibility to extract them provides potential uses in the pharmaceutical industry. All the HAlks are based on a similar basic molecular structure, changing only few of the substituent without significant molecular mass differences. All of them have, at least, one -amine- ionizable group. These properties become the HAlks an interesting challenge for analytical separations and, particularly for capillary electrophoresis. In this work we separated harmine, harmaline, harmol and harmalol and two less abundant, harmane and norharmane. Firstly, the background electrolyte (BGE) pH has been optimized based on the theoretical curves of mobility as a function of pH. After establish the pH zones that provide the best selectivity, different buffering compounds have been experimentally tested. Secondly, other parameters like BGE concentration, voltage, type and proportion of organic solvents, have been optimized. Finally, using the optimized conditions, analytical figures for each studied compound have been calculated from the data obtained with three different commercial instruments in order to verify the method transfer. The method showed to be useful for the separation and quantification of these six structurally related alkaloids.