Tetramethylammonium-lactobionate: A novel ionic liquid chiral selector based on saccharides in capillary electrophoresis

Chiral ionic liquids (ILs) have aroused widespread interest in separation science; however, only a few papers have reported the application of chiral ILs in CE for enantioseparation, and the use of chiral ILs as the sole chiral selector in an electrophoretic or a chromatographic system was reported in only three papers. In this study, we designed a lactobionic acid LA-based IL, tetramethylammonium-lactobionate (TMA-LA), and it is very interesting to find that the chiral separation capability can be remarkably improved when a conventional saccharide chiral selector evolved into an IL chiral selector. A comparative study of the enantiorecognition capability of three separation systems (single LA system, LA + TMA-chloride (TMA-Cl) system, and TMA-LA IL system) was also conducted, and the results showed that the use of TMA-LA IL as the sole chiral selector exhibited a remarkable superiority. A series of parameters affecting the enantioseparation, such as the type and proportion of organic modifier, buffer composition and pH, chiral selector concentration, as well as applied voltage were systematically investigated. The best enantioseparation was obtained at pH 7.6 using a 40 mM borax buffer with 40% v/v methanol, 200 mM TMA-LA, and 20 kV applied voltage. It is the first time that a saccharide-based IL is evaluated as a sole chiral selector in CE, and we hope this study would provide a new direction for the development of novel ILs chiral selectors based on conventional chiral selectors.