Development of capillary electrophoresis methods for quantitative determination of taurine in vehicle system and biological media.

CE methods have been developed for the determination of taurine in pharmaceutical formulation (microemulsion) and in biological media such as sweat. The CE system with end-column pulsed amperometric detection has been found to be an interesting method in comparison with UV and fluorescence detection for its simplicity and rapidity. A gold-disk electrode of 100 mm diameter was used as the working electrode. The effects of a field decoupler at the end of the capillary, separation voltage, injection and pressure times were investigated. A detection limit of 4 x 10(-5) mol/L was reached using integrated pulsed amperometric detection, a method successfully applied to taurine analysis of the biological samples such as sweat. For taurine analysis of oil-in-water microemulsion, fluorescence detector was the favored method, the detection limit of which was 4 x 10(-11) mol/L.

Identification of hyaluronic acid oligosaccharides by direct coupling of capillary electrophoresis with electrospray ion trap mass spectrometry.

A new method for the identification of oligosaccharides obtained by enzymatic digestion of hyaluronic acid (HA) with bacterial hyaluronidase (HA lyase, E.C. 4.2.2.1, from Streptococcus agalactiae) using online capillary electrophoresis/electrospray mass spectrometry (CE/ESI-MS) is presented. A fused-silica capillary coated with polyacrylamide was used with a 40 mM ammonium acetate buffer at pH 9.0 and a separation voltage of +30 kV applied to the inlet. Separation was achieved for oligosaccharides containing 4-16 monomers. The migration behavior follows the chain length of the oligomers, regardless of charge state. However, no linear relationship was found for the relation between mobility and chain length. Using an ion trap mass analyzer, complementary structural information was obtained by MS/MS and MS(n) experiments.