Clearing up the oxygen dip in HPAEC-PAD sugar analysis: Sodium sulfite as an oxygen scavenger

A baseline dip caused by the reduction of dissolved oxygen in samples has been a source of trouble in the analysis of major monosaccharides (galactose, glucose, mannose, and fructose) in the high-performance anion-exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection system. This study attempted three different methods to remove the baseline dip from the resulting chromatograms, and among the approaches, sodium sulfite was found to act as the best oxygen scavenger. Clean chromatograms were obtained by adding at least 3 mg/mL sodium sulfite to samples, which removed the baseline dip and improved the accuracy of sugar analysis. Although sodium sulfite does not influence analytical sensitivity, it can cause a reduction of sugar retention; however, retention time can be recovered by washing with 200 mM sodium hydroxide solution. Results demonstrated that sodium sulfite is an effective means either to remove the baseline dip for low concentration analysis under 1 mg/L, or to separate the target sugar from the baseline dip by retention time rearrangement.