ABSTRACT
Sugar alcohols and parabens are commonly used ingredients in oral suspension formulations. However, their possible incompatibility because of transesterification reaction is a concern during formulation development. In order to gain more knowledge about the reaction, a high-performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method is developed to separate the transesterification reaction products of methylparaben preservative with twelve 3- to 6-carbon sugar alcohols and propylene glycol. It is found that the number of peaks separated or partially separated correlate well with the number of distinct hydroxyl groups present in the sugar alcohol molecules. This means that all the hydroxyl groups in a sugar alcohol molecule can react with methylparaben to form transesterification reaction products. These products are positional isomers that have identical UV spectra with a maximum at 255 nm and the same m/z ratio for molecular ions by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. When isolated individually, they can isomerize (interconvert) under suitable conditions to form other positional isomers by intramolecular acyl migration. The acyl migration pathway for each of the isolated positional isomers from the transesterification reaction of methylparaben with sorbitol, ribitol, and xylitol is followed by HPLC. Based on the information, a tentative assignment of the six isomer peaks generated from the transesterification reaction between methylparaben and sorbitol is proposed.
ABSTRACT
New developments in detection technologies are providing a variety of biomolecular screening strategies from which to choose. Consequently, we performed a detailed analysis of both separation-based and non-separation-based formats for screening nuclear receptor ligands. In this study, time-resolved fluorescence resonance energy transfer (TR-FRET), ALPHAScreen, and time-resolved fluorescence (TRF) assays were optimized and compared with respect to sensitivity, reproducibility, and miniaturization capability. The results showed that the ALPHAScreen system had the best sensitivity and dynamic range. The TRF assay was more time consuming because of the number of wash steps necessary. The TR-FRET assay had less interwell variation, most likely because of ratiometric measurement. Both the ALPHAScreen and the TR-FRET assays were miniaturized to 8-microl volumes. Of the photomultiplier tube-based readers, the ALPHAScreen reader (ALPHAQuest) presented the advantage of faster reading times through simultaneous reading with four photomultiplier tubes.
