A new chiral derivatizing agent for the HPLC separation of α-amino acids on a standard reverse-phase column

A new chiral derivatizing agent for α-amino acids is described which leads to diastereomers that can be separated by reverse-phase HPLC with direct detection by a diode array detector. The main advantage of the presented procedure is the fact that an excess of the derivatizing reagent can be employed as the product exhibits an absorption maximum at 360 nm, while the reagent has its absorption maximum at 260 nm. Therefore, it is possible to suppress the reagent signal by a detection wavelength of 400 nm leading to an easy and general method for the enantioseparation of a mixture of DL-amino acids and the determination of the enantiomeric purity of α-amino acid as exemplified by 16 different α-amino acids.