Live Capillary Zone Electrophoresis Separation And Determination Of Tobacco Alkaloids

Alkaloid is one of the most important components in tobacco. Among tobacco alkaloids, the concentration of nicotine is the highest and those of other alkaloids are quite low. Some alkaloids influence the quality of cigarette. In addition, the tobacco alkaloids can generate specific tobacco nitrosamines during smoking, which may be the causative factor of lung, esophagus and oral cavity cancers in the smoking population. Therefore, it is necessary to concentrate and determine tobacco alkaloids in cigarette samples, including nicotine, nornicotine, myosmine and anabasine etc.In recent years, some determination methods of tobacco alkaloids were reported, including gas chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis etc.Capillary electrophoresis is a simple, rapid, low-cost and environment-friendly separation technique. However, only a few paper reported the separation of tobacco alkaloids except myosmine with capillary electrophoresis. In this dissertation, the separation of tobacco alkaloids was investigated and an effective separation method with capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) was proposed, which was capable of separating more alkaloids including myosmine in tobacco samples. It was found that the tartaric buffer solution at low pH provided higher separation efficiency and detection sensitivity comparing with those of phosphate buffer solution. In addition, cation-selective exhaustive injection, as an on-column preconcentration method of CZE, was also investigated for the analysis of trace alkaloids in cigarette samples.Tobacco alkaloids have three protonated species depending on the pH value of...