Microchip capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry for high-throughput simultaneous analysis of B-complex vitamins

B-complex vitamins are essential micronutrients that maintaining health, and provide (individually/simultaneously) many important biological actions in organism. Therefore, sensitive, reliable analytical method to determine B-complex vitamins simultaneously in actual samples is significant. Conventional analytical methods for vitamins analysis are usually labor-intensive, time-consuming and mostly do not allow the simultaneous determination. Few papers have been published on capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) analysis of individual vitamin B or B-complex vitamins. Microchip capillary electrophoresis (ME) offers less consumption of background electrolyte and reagents than CE, and fast separation as having several channels for high-throughput. ME based on ZipChip integrates sample injection, electrophoretic separation, and ESI functions into one platform, herein, for the first time, in this paper, the ME-MS based on ZipChip platform was investigated and demonstrated preliminarily a significant improvement over existing techniques. Because: the ME-MS method has a linear response with excellent precision for replicate injections and LODs lower than 4 ppb; The method is simple and fast (<3 min per sample), using a small amount of sample (∼5 nL) with low reagent consumption, making it suitable for high-throughput applications; The inter/intraday reproducibility (RSD %) is less than 3 %, which is important for clinic application.