A fast, single column high-performance anion exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection method for the determination of saccharides in atmospheric aerosol samples.

Saccharides, especially anhydro sugars present in atmospheric aerosols, can be used as tracers to track sources of atmospheric aerosols. High-performance anion-exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection is a commonly used technique for determining these saccharides, but the reported methods suffer from three drawbacks. First, to achieve separation of the complete set of atmospheric saccharides, run times are very long, typically longer than 60 minutes. Second, some methods require two columns to achieve the desired separation. Finally, in an era when electrolytic eluent preparation allows for excellent precision and accuracy, these methods require manually prepared eluents, which can lead to separation inconsistency for closely eluting analytes. These drawbacks make existing methods difficult to automate. To address this issue, we developed a fast method that uses only a single column for separation and electrolytically generated eluent that resolves 12 key atmospheric aerosol saccharides in 20 minutes. The resolved saccharides include anhydro sugars (levoglucosan, galactosan, and mannosan), sugar alcohols (erythritol, xylitol, and mannitol), and mono-/disaccharides (arabinose, galactose, glucose, mannose, fructose, and sucrose). To our knowledge, this report is the first instance of achieving such a significant reduction in run time with good resolution for this set of saccharides.