Precision in capillary electrophoresis with respect to quantitative analysis of suramin

Suramin is an important anti-tumor and anti-viral chemotherapeutic agent. We have previously presented a capillary electrophoresis (CE) method for its quantitative analysis, where its quantitation was linear over three orders of magnitude, with good precision (1.8%) and accuracy. The constantly varying electroosmotic properties of the capillary due to various causes such as analyte adsorption to the inner wall, affect the migration times of analytes during consecutive electrophoresis runs. This results in progressive changes in analyte peak areas, causing less desirable or unacceptable CE assay precision. This paper illustrates a strategy to overcome the problem of assay reproducibility by using an internal standard whose migration time is short and close to that of the analyte so that the relative change of migration time is minimized. Assay precisions as good as 0.3% were observed in these experiments. These results are in agreement with the theoretical basis of experimental capillary electrophoresis.