Ultra-performance chromatographic methods for enantioseparation of liquid crystals based on lactic acid

Fast and efficient ultra-performance chromatographic methods were developed for enantioseparation of new liquid crystals based on lactic acid. Ultra-performance supercritical fluid chromatography and non-aqueous reversed-phase liquid chromatography were applied for the first time for enantioseparation of this type of analytes. Both techniques proved to be suitable and baseline enantioseparation of all compounds was achieved with tris(3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) derivative of amylose as chiral selector. The compounds differentiate in number of benzene rings, length of alkyl side chains and presence of chlorine as lateral substituent and the effect of analyte structure on the enantioseparation was assessed. Significant effect of type of mobile phase modifier was observed in both systems including switching the enantiomer elution order based on both the type of the modifier (both techniques) and its portion in mobile phase (non-aqueous reversed-phase mode only).