Investigation of the synergistic effect of chiral ionic liquids as additives in non-aqueous capillary electrophoresis for enantioseparation.

In this work, tetraalkylammonium amino acid ionic liquids (TAA-AAILs) were first applied to non-aqueous capillary electrophoresis (NACE) to establish synergistic systems with a conventional chiral selector, native β-cyclodextrin (β-CD). Excellent enantioseparations of some dansyl-amino acid (Dns-AA) samples were achieved. A series of comparison experiments and a molecular docking study were performed to validate the synergistic effect of TAA-AAILs and β-CD in NACE. Several interesting results were observed compared with previously reported chiral ILs-related aqueous CE studies. In particular, the direct enantioselectivity of TAA-AAILs was observed for the first time by using it as sole chiral selector in NACE. This was an encouraging finding because it was the first direct and convincing evidence that AAILs were able to participate in the enantiorecognition process in the conventional chiral selectors-based synergistic systems. The new TAA-AAILs synergistic NACE system was further optimized in terms of alkyl chain length, TAA-AAILs concentration, β-CD concentration, electrolyte composition and applied voltage, etc. Best enantioseparations of Dns-AAs were obtained when 100 mM β-CD and 10 mM tetramethylammonium-l-arginine (TMA-l-Arg) were added in an NMF buffer containing 50 mM Tris and 35 mM CA (apparent pH 7.85) under UV detection. The applied voltage was set at 30 kV. The method was then successfully employed for the determination of enantiomeric impurities of a real AA sample. This work proved that the use of chiral ILs as additives in NACE is a promising approach for enantioseparation.