Atropisomeric Separation of PCB-95 by HPLC

2,2’,3,5’,6-Pentachlorobiphenyl (PCB-95) is an environmentally significant chiral PCB, of which enantioselective toxicity, biodegradation and chiral stability studies have been limited to date, as no commercially available enantiomers exist for PCB-95 and due to the lack of an efficient preparatory chiral separation method. A selective, sensitive, and rapid high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection (HPLC-UV) method has been developed and validated for the chromatographic separation and quantitation of PCB-95 enantiomers. In this study, we resolved enantiomers of PCB-95 using a cellulose tris (4-methylbenzoate) Chiralcel OJ- H column. After evaluating mobile phase compositions and temperatures, optimum separation and detection were obtained with isocratic 100% n-hexane as the mobile phase, a column temperature of 20°C, a flow rate of 1 mL/min, and a detection wavelength of 280 nm. The total run time was 8 minutes. Enantiomer purity was confirmed using enantioselective gas capillary chromatography-electron capture detection. The developed method was validated as per International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines with respect to limit of detection, limit of quantification, precision, linearity, robustness and ruggedness.