Simple and Low-Cost High-Performance Liquid Chromatographic Method for Determination of D- and L-Amino Acids

In this article, a simple and low-cost method for the analysis of amino acid enantiomers by using high–performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is described. In this method, the amino acids are modified to diastereomers in order to be separated into enantiomers on a usual C18 reversed-phase column. Methanol instead of acetonitrile is used as an elution solvent; the results of HPLC with methanol elution are comparable with those of HPLC with acetonitrile elution. Sub-nanomolar sensitivity is attained by measuring the absorbance at 340 nm in analysis of 15 amino-acid enantiomers.