Carbohydrates play a very important role in the human life cycle and form the base of many foodstuffs. 1 As integral components of glycoproteins and glycolipids, carbohydrates are involved in many biological processes, such as cell recognition and the immune response. 2,3 Therefore, carbohydrate analysis is still of great interest.Various direct detection methods have been reported for carbohydrate combined with separation techniques, including flame ionization detection, 4 mass spectroscopy detection, 5 refractive index, 6 indirect UV (or fluorescence) 7,8 and pulsed amperometric detection 9 for gas chromatography, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), ion chromatography and capillary electrophoresis (CE). Because carbohydrates lack chromophores (or fluorophores) to facilitate the sensitive detection with UV (or fluorescence) detection, derivatization has most widely been used for carbohydrate analysis. A number of methods were reported based on reductive amination with various chromophores (fluorophores): aminobenzoic acid (AA), 10 8-aminonaphthalene-1,3,6-trisulfonate (ANTS), 11 dansylhydrazine (DHZ), 12 and 9-aminoacridone (AMAC). 13 A direct chemiluminophore derivatization method was also reported using 3-aminophthalhydrazide (APH) for the analysis of monosaccharides. 14 Recently, tris(2,2′-bipyridyl)ruthenium(II) [Ru(bpy)3 3+ ]-based electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) detection has been widely studied because it provides an extremely sensitive means of detection. Many works were reported for the assays of amino acids, proteins, amines, drugs with the combination of HPLC and CE separation techniques. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] In this study, we investigate the CE-ECL method for the analysis of four monosaccharides, which usually closely positioned in CE electropherograms, using 2-diethylaminoethanethiol (DEAET) as a derivatization reagent.
Experimental
Reagents and chemicalsTris(2,2′-bipyridyl)dichlororuthenium (II) ) were all HPLC grade. All buffer solutions were prepared with water purified in a Milli-Q System (Millipore, Beford, MA, USA). The standard solutions of monosaccharides were prepared with methanol and stored in a refrigerator at 4˚C.
ApparatusA CE system was assembled in the laboratory. A Spellman CZE 1000R (Plainview, NY, USA) was used for electrophoresis and electrokinetic injection. A 25-μm i.d. 90-cm long uncoated fused-silica capillary (Polymicro Technologies, Phoenix, AZ, USA) was used for the CE column. The detection cell used in this study was similar to that described elsewhere. 22 A Pt working electrode (1.0 mm in diameter), a Pt wire counter electrode (1 mm in diameter) and a Ag/AgCl reference electrode were used in a conventional three-electrode system. The distance from the capillary end to working electrode surface was set at 100 μm by a microcontroller. Controlled potential electrolysis for Ru(bpy)3 2+ oxidation was carried out with a BAS-Epsilon (West Lafayette, IN, USA) electrochemical analyzer. The ECL light was captured by a Hamamatsu Photonics R238 photomult...