Effects of derivatization reagents consisting of n-alkyl chloroformate/n-alcohol combinations in LC–ESI-MS/MS analysis of zwitterionic antiepileptic drugs

Abstract

In the current study, three antiepileptic drugs with zwitterionic properties, namely vigabatrin, pregabalin and gabapentin, were chosen as model analytes to undergo derivatization by applying various n-alkyl chloroformate/n-alcohol combinations, followed by LC–ESI-MS/MS analysis. The employment of 16 combinations per drug using methyl, ethyl, propyl or butyl chloroformate coupled with methanol, ethanol, propanol or butanol, greatly affected a series of parameters of the derivatives, such as retention time on C8 column, signal expressed via areas, limit of detection values, as well as the yields of the main and side reactions. Practically, even slight modification of n-alkyl group of either chloroformate or alcohol resulted in significant changes in the chromatographic and mass spectrometric behavior of the novel derivative. It was clearly demonstrated that all the estimated parameters were highly correlated with the length of n-alkyl groups of the involved chloroformate and alcohol. The most significant influence was monitored in peak area values, indicating that the length of the n-alkyl chain plays an important role in electrospray ionization efficiency. For this parameter, increasing the n-alkyl chain from methyl to butyl led to increment up to 2089%, 508.7% and 1075% for area values of derivatized vigabatrin, pregabalin and gabapentin, respectively. These changes affected also the corresponding values of limits of detection, with the estimated improvements up to 1553%, 397.7% and 875.0% for the aforementioned derivatized drugs, respectively. Besides the obvious utilization of these conclusions in the development of bioanalytical methods for these analytes with the current protocol, this study offers valuable data which can be useful in more general approaches, giving insights into the effects of this derivatization reaction and its performances.