Determination of avermectins by the internal standard recovery correction - high performance liquid chromatography -...

Quantitative Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (qNMR) is widely used to determine the purity of organic compounds. For the compounds with lower purity especially molecular weight more than 500, qNMR is at risk of error for the purity, because the impurity peaks are likely to be incompletely separated from the peak of major component. In this study, an offline ISRC-HPLC-qNMR (internal standard recovery correction - high performance liquid chromatography - qNMR) was developed to overcome this problem. It is accurate by excluding the influence of impurity; it is low-cost by using common mobile phase; and it extends the applicable scope of qNMR. In this method, a mix solution of the sample and an internal standard was separated by HPLC with common mobile phases, and only the eluents of the analyte and the internal standard were collected in the same tube. After evaporation and re-dissolution, it was determined by qNMR. A recovery correction factor was determined by comparison of the solutions before and after these procedures. After correction, the mass fraction of analyte was constant and it was accurate and precise, even though the sample loss varied during these procedures, or even in bad resolution of HPLC. Avermectin B₁a with the purity of ~93% and the molecular weight of 873 was analyzed. Moreover, the homologues of avermectin B₁a were determined based on the identification and quantitative analysis by tandem mass spectrometry and HPLC, and the results were consistent with the results of traditional mass balance method. The result showed that the method could be widely used for the organic compounds, and could further promote qNMR to become a primary method in the international metrological systems.