Development and validation of a capillary electrophoresis method with capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (CE-C4D) for the analysis of amikacin and its related substances

Amikacin is a semisynthetic aminoglycoside antibiotic derived from kanamycin A that lacks a strong UV absorbing chromophore or fluorophore. Due to the physicochemical properties of amikacin and its related substances, CE in combination with capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (CE-C4D) was chosen. The optimized separation method uses a BGE composed of 20 mM MES adjusted to pH 6.6 by l-histidine and 0.3 mM CTAB that was added as flow modifier in a concentration below the CMC. Ammonium acetate 20 mg.L-1 was used as internal standard. 30 kV was applied in reverse polarity on a fused silica capillary (73/48 cm; 75 mu m id). The optimized separation was obtained in less than 6 min with good linearity (R2 = 0.9996) for amikacin base. It shows a good precision expressed as RSD on relative peak areas equal to 0.1 and 0.7% for intraday and interday, respectively. The LOD and LOQ are 0.5 mg.L-1 and 1.7 mg.L-1, respectively.