The preparation of poly-levodopa coated capillary column for capillary electrochromatography enantioseparation

Levodopa (L-DOPA) is promising as chiral stationary phase for open tubular capillary electrochromatography (OT-CEC) enantioseparation owing to its self-polymerization adhesive property and chiral recognition potential. In this work, CuSO₄/H₂O₂ was used as a trigger agent to accelerate the polymerization process of L-DOPA and the poly-levodopa (poly-(L-DOPA)) coated column was successfully prepared for the first time by depositing it on the inner wall of fused silica capillary via the rapid and in-situ approach at room temperature. The performance of the poly-(L-DOPA) coated capillary was validated by the separation of different chiral analytes, including chiral amine drugs, neurotransmitters and amino acids, and the good enantioseparation efficiencies were achieved. For five consecutive runs, the relative standard deviations (RSDs) for the migration time of the analytes for intra-day, inter-day and column-to-column were in the range of 0.19–1.33%, 0.96–4.47%, and 2.21–7.79%, respectively. Additionally, the poly-(L-DOPA) coated capillary column could be successively used over 250 runs without observable change in the separation efficiency.