Superior Aspects of Liquid Chromatography- Based Mass Spectrometers in Chiral Analysis

Chirality has many important roles in life activities because enzymes, amino acids, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, fats, metabolic intermediates, and many other types of biomolecules are chiral. Due to the different properties of enantiomers, chirality is important in biological systems, and it is also critically important in many other fields, such as the pharmaceutical industry, chemical industry, petrochemical industry, food industry, and agrochemicals, particularly, medicine. Roughly 56% of the pharmaceuticals currently in use are chiral, and 88% of these are administered in racemic proportions, while single-enantiomer formulations of some marketed drugs have shown the higher potency of one stereoisomer compared to the other. Although they have the same chemical structures, most of the enantiomers present in racemic drugs have different pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic, biological, and toxic effects. The amounts of chiral molecules in different matrices are far below the levels required for the analysis of pharmaceutical preparations. Therefore, high resolution and sensitivity are needed to analyze chiral molecules. Mass spectrometers, which generally offer higher levels of sensitivity than conventional detection systems and accordingly allow the analysis of lower levels of analytes, have made large contributions to separation and detection science. Developments in new types of columns, different analysis modes, different matrices, and pharmaceutics will be explored in this chapter. The parameters will be discussed with the pros and cons together with their applicability to different sample types.