Rapid Determination of Enantiomeric Excess of Tert-Butoxycarbonyl (BOC-Protected) Amino Acids Based on Infrared Spectra Technique with Optimal Wavelet Packet Transform Decomposition Frequency Band

Abstract

A method was employed to determine enantiomeric excess (ee) value of chiral tert-butoxycarbonyl (Boc-protected) amino acids in a rapid way by using an infrared spectroscopy technique combined with wavelet packet transform (WPT) and least squares support vector machines (LS-SVM). Infrared spectral data were decomposed by using WPT algorithm. Simulated annealing (SA) algorithm was then used to search the optimal decomposed frequency band that had the greatest contribution to the quantitative analysis of ee values. As a result, the band (7, 34) with 34 variables and the band (5, 1) with 116 variables were determined as the optimal ones for the determination of Boc-protected proline and alanine, respectively. The selected variables in the optimal band were used as the inputs of LS-SVM models. The spectral variables selected by the WPT-SA method had lower predicting errors than full range spectra and the spectral variables selected by some traditional variable selection methods. Reasonable good results with root mean-square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 7.51 and 3.80 were obtained for the determination of ee values of two Boc-protected amino acids, showing that it is possible to rapidly determine ee values of amino acids by using IR spectroscopy rapidly.

Keywords:

• Amino acid
• Enantiomeric excess
• Infrared spectroscopy
• Variable selection
• Wavelet packet transform (WPT)

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. Y3110289 and Zhejiang Provincial Key Science and Technology Innovation Team Fund Project (2012R10006-03).