Capillary electrophoresis of high-molecular chitosan: The natural carbohydrate biopolymer

Due to its high resolving power and diverse application range, capillary el ectrophoresis (CE) has been successfully applied to the analysis of carbohy drates. In this paper, a method for the determination of high-molecular chi tosan (M-r 200 000) using CE is presented. We studied the optimal condition of buffer pH and type, and column type for determination of chitosan. Opti mal CE performance was found when employing 100 mM triethylamine (TEA)-phos phate buffer, pH 2.0 and untreated fused-silica capillary (50 mum x 27 cm) for the chitosan analysis. Under optimum conditions, excellent linear respo nses were obtained in the concentration range of 1.25-20 mum, with a linear correlation coefficient of 0.9983. The standard deviations of the migratio n time and peak area were found to be 2.5 and 6.4%, respectively. This meth od could be readily applied to chitosan determination in real biological sa mples and commercial products.