A practical procedure for the determination of association constants of the analyte-chiral selector equilibria by capillary zone electrophoresis.

A practical procedure is proposed for the determination of association constants and mobility of the associate of a solute with a chiral selector in chiral separations by capillary zone electrophoresis. The procedure is based on the measurement of the effective mobility of a solute at zero and two different nonzero concentrations of the chiral selector. Simple explicit formulas have been derived in order to calculate the required data. The essence of the procedure is that all mobility data are adjusted to the background electrolyte (BGE) without chiral selector, serving as the viscosity reference. A simple procedure is described for measuring the viscosity of the operational electrolytes directly with the commercial capillary electrophoresis instrumentation, and Walden's rule has been utilized for adjusting the experimental mobility data to constant reference viscosity. The use of the procedure is exemplified by a separation of D,L-tryptophan in BGE containing alpha-cyclodextrin as chiral selector.