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 C(18) 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.