Chemometric amino sugar mixture analysis with a chiroptical assay array

Optical sensing of biomolecules based on well-defined chemical modifications with chromophoric probes has become an increasingly popular strategy for high-throughput mixture analysis. Glucosamine, galactosamine and mannosamine are closely related amino sugar stereoisomers with important biological roles and therapeutic effects. This study describes the use of a chiroptical sensing array for simultaneous quantification of these natural products without chromatographic separation. This is achieved with complementary sample derivatizations and ridge regression analysis of four UV and CD responses obtained by covalent analyte modifications with different chromophoric groups. Good agreement between the actual and predicted values is demonstrated for 20 independently prepared test samples. The workflow is operationally simple and only requires mixing of the samples with commercially available reagents followed by dilution and fast chiroptical measurements.