Porous graphitized carbon (PGC) has proved to be an excellent tool for the separation of positional-and stereoisomers of steroids, cephalosporin antibiotics and cresols. 1 The retention mechanism of PGC has been extensively discussed. Under non-polar conditions, PGC acted as an electron-pair acceptor of solutes. 2 Another study indicated the importance of dipoleinduced dipole interactions in the retention mechanism. 3 The influence of physicochemical parameters of some ring-substituted aniline derivatives on their retention on the PGC column has been studied in aqueous eluent systems. It has been established that the retention on the PGC column of ring-substituted aniline derivatives is mainly governed by the sterical parameters of the substituents. 4,5 Multivariate mathematical-statistical methods such as canonical correlation 6 and cluster analysis (CA) 7 , stepwise regression analysis (SRA) 8 , and principal component analysis (PCA) 9 have been frequently used to extract maximum information from retention data matrices of considerable dimensions.The objective of our investigations was to study the retention behavior of some barbituric acid derivatives on a PGC column using ethanol-water mixtures as eluents, to assess the relationship between the physicochemical characteristics and retention parameters of barbituric acid derivatives by means of PCA combined with CA and SRA, and to elucidate the similarities and dissimilarities in the information content of the various calculation methods. The study was motivated by the fact that, to the best of our knowledge the combination of PCA, CA and SRA has not been used so far in the study of molecular structure-retention behavior relationships.
ExperimentalThe HPLC system was identical to that described in ref. 5. The flow rate was 1.0 ml min -1 and the detection wavelength was set to 240 nm. Mixtures of ethanolwater were used as eluents; ethanol concentration ranged from 70 to 90%v/v (in steps of 5%v/v). The eluents were not buffered. In agreement with the results of refs. 10 and 11, we found that the column temperature exerts a considerable effect on the retention. The column was thermostated at 22.5±0.5˚C in order to reduce the influence of temperature oscillation. The chemical structure of barbituric acid derivatives is depicted in Table 1. They were dissolved in the eluents in 0.05 mg ml -1 concentration. The retention time of each compound in each eluent was determined with three consecutive determinations. The logarithm of the capacity factor, k′ was linearly correlated to the ethanol concentration, V (vol%): log k′=log k′ 0 +bC (1) where log k′ 0 and b are constants to be determined by the least square method. For the determination of the molecular parameters significantly influencing the retention, the intercept and slope values of Eq. (1) were correlated with the physicochemical characteristics of barbituric acid derivatives, using PCA followed by CA and two-dimensional nonlinear mapping. The physicochemical parameters included in the calculation were: π=Ha...