Evaluation of capillary zone electrophoresis and micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography with direct injection of plasma for the determination of cefotaxime and its metabolite.

Quantitative aspects of capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) and micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MECC) were investigated for the determination of cefotaxime (C) and its deacetyl metabolite (DA) in human plasma in a concentration range of therapeutic interest. For CZE, plasma samples spiked with C and DA were injected after deproteinization with acetonitrile, and analytes were separated in a fused silica capillary using a borate buffer at pH 9.2 as electrolyte; no suitable internal standard was found. For MECC, plasma samples spiked with C, DA, and theobromine as internal standard were directly injected after dilution with water and analyzed using a phosphate buffer, pH 8.00, containing 165 mM SDS as separation electrolyte and a fused silica capillary. Both methods gave satisfactory interday precision with respect to migration times (RSD < 1%) and gave linear responses over the concentration ranges investigated (5-100 mg L-1 C and 5-20 mg L-1 DA). For CZE, intraday RSD (n = 4 graphs) between the slopes of the calibration graphs was acceptable (5.7%) for C. The corresponding figures for interday precision (n = 4 days) were fair (16.1%) in comparison to those obtained with MECC, for which the RSD was 1.49% when theobromine was used as internal standard. A satisfactory interday precision between slopes was also obtained with MECC even without the use of an internal standard (RSD = 4.38%), which demonstrated the ruggedness of this method. Detection limits (S/N = 3) were about 2 mg L-1 (CZE) and 1 mg L-1 in plasma (MECC) for C and DA. MECC was shown to be superior with regard to simplicity, rapidity, precision, and sensitivity.