Construction of chiral ligand exchange capillary electrochromatography for D,L-amino acids enantioseparation and its application in glutaminase kinetics study

Abstract A chiral ligand exchange capillary electrochromatography (CLE-CEC) protocol was designed and implemented for d , l -amino acids enantioseparation with poly(maleic anhydride-styrene-methacryloyl- l -arginine methyl ester) as the coating. The block copolymer was synthesized through the reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer reaction. In the constructed CLE-CEC system, poly (methacryloyl- l -arginine methyl ester) moiety of the block copolymer played the role as the immobilized chiral ligand and Zn (II) was used as the central ion. Key factors, including pH of buffer solution, ratio of Zn (II) to ligands, the mass ratio of monomers in the block copolymer, which affect the enantioresolution were investigated. Comparing with the bare capillary, the CLE-CEC enantioresolution was enhanced greatly with the coating one. 5 Pairs of d , l -amino acids enantiomers obtained baseline separation with 5 pairs partly separated. The mechanism of enhancement enantioresolution of the developed CLE-CEC system was explored briefly. Further, good linearities were achieved in the range of 25.0 μM–5.0 mM for quantitative analysis of d -glutamine (r 2  = 0.997) and l -glutamine (r 2  = 0.991). Moreover, the proposed CLE-CEC assay was successfully applied in the kinetics study of glutaminase by using l -glutamine as the substrate.