Pulsed Electrochemical Detection of Aryl‐ and Alkylglycosides Following Reversed‐Phase Liquid Chromatography

Abstract

Pulsed electrochemical detection (PED) coupled to reversed‐phase high performance liquid chromatography is applied to the detection of aryl‐ and alkylglycosides. PED is used to detect these compounds sensitively without the need of derivatization. Detection limits using an optimized waveform are typically 80–40 and 400–200 nM for aryl‐ and alkylglycosides, respectively. For arylglycosides, PED proved generally to be comparable to absorbance detection at 254 nm (300–5 nM) and 204 nm (40–20 nM). The advantages of PED over UV detection are highlighted for alkylglycosides, for which optical detection at 204 nm produced no analytical signal. This work is applied to the determination of a commercial biological surfactant known as Elugent™, which is used to solubilize cell membrane proteins.

Keywords:

• Pulsed electrochemical detection
• HPLC
• Glycosides
• Surfactants
• Carbohydrates

Acknowledgment

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Dionex Corporation.