Knowledge of The HILIC Retention Behaviors of Two Quinolone Antibiotics on Sulfobetaine-Type Zwitterionic Stationary Phases

Fluoroquinolones treat infections of the urinary, respiratory, gastrointestinal, skin, bone, and joint systems. This article describes the development of the hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (ZIC-HILIC) method to determine norfl oxacin and ofl oxacin retention characteristics. Separation of all analytes was accomplished using ZIC-HILIC1 and ZIC-HILIC4 columns. The mobile phase was 40 mM sodium acetate water solution in acetonitrile pumped at a 0.7 mL/min fl ow rate. The infl uence of acetonitrile concentration, the presence of salt in the mobile phase, and pH on the retention of norfl oxacin and ofl oxacin in the HILIC mode were investigated in this study. When using ZIC-HILIC columns, it was discovered that the retention factors of the analytes were inversely proportional to the amount of water present in the mobile phase, which is representative of a conventional hydrophilic partitioning mechanism. The ZIC-HILIC based strategies described in this article represent a signifi cant step toward more sensitive drug analysis. We observed that zwitterionic materials could govern the separation of materials, as shown by the infl uence of the chain length between the zwitterion groups, which contributed to the explanation of the variation in the retention period of the materials to be separated.