ON-LINE CHROMATOGRAPHY PROCESS FOR CHIRAL SEPARATION USING CARBON NANOWIRES AS A STATIONARY PHASE AND LYSOZYME AS CHIRAL SELECTOR ADDED TO MOBILE PHASE

LORENA L. SOMBRA; ADRIANA P. SALINAS; PATRICIA W. STEGE

Mendoza

Congreso; XXXVI REUNION CIENTIFICA ANUAL DE LA SOCIEDAD DE BIOLOGIA DE CUYO; 2018

Many pharmaceutical compounds have one or more chiral centers that are responsible for their optical activity. The importance of chirality in the activity of these compounds has long been recognized due to the fact that those enantiomers exhibit different activities in human and animal bodies. Being able to define the amount of each in a mixture has become of utmost importance for the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, developments of methods for enantiomer separation are extremely valuable. The applications of nanoparticles (NPs) are increasing in separation science; many past papers reported the use of NPs as stationary phases in chromatography to improve selectivity, chemical stability, and separation efficiency of chromatography. In addition, carbon nanotubes (CNT) have been also subjected to an intense research owing to their unique their physical, mechanical and chemical properties. Other nanoscale carbons, such as carbon nanowires (CNWs) which is a new member of one-dimensional (1-D) nanomaterials with solid core, large aspect ratio and highly curved structures, have attracted much less attention.Nanowires have a cross-section in the nanometer scale, and a length-to-width ratio in the range of 1000 or higher, a size regime where quantum effects produce new electrical, physical, and mechanical properties. In this work we proposed a methodology to separate a racemic mixture tryptophan, an essential amino acid which has chiral characteristics and deeply involved in the synthesis of serotonin, a hormone strongly related with stress. A separation column was developed using CNWs as support. For the assembly of the column 2.7 to 12 mg of CNWs were weighedand a mobile phase containing lysozyme, a protein well known as chiral selector was studied. The injected samples were determined using aHewlett Packard spectrophotometer. The preliminary results showed a high resolution and an important difference in the retention time of the chiral analytes in the developed column. The proposed methodology also showed high reproducibility and repeatability between separations, day-days and the use of different columns.