Gas chromatography of alpha-keto acids as their O-trimethyl silylquinoxalinol derivatives

The O-trimethylsilyl (TMS) quinoxalinols are very useful derivatives for the gas chromatography of alpha-keto acids because of their high stability and the absence of stereoisomerism and because of the presence of specific, common and abundant fragments in electron impact mass spectra, which allows the low-level detection of whole groups of keto acids by single-ion detection. In this paper, the chromatographic properties of eleven O-TMS-quinoxalinols on OV-1, OV-17 and Dexsil 300 are reported in terms of methylene units. Also by use of methylene units, the chromatographic isotope effect is analyzed in detail for nine perdeutero-TMS derivatives. The effect is explained by the diminished interaction of the deuterated compounds with the unlabelled liquid phase.