Determination of scopolamine, atropine and anisodamine in Flos daturae by capillary electrophoresis

Abstract

A capillary electrophoresis method was developed for the separation and determination of tropane alkaloids in Flos daturae plants. Separation was performed on a fused silica capillary(42.1 cm x 50 microm i.d.) at an applied voltage of 20 kV. Scopolamine, atropine and anisodamine were well separated in the buffer of 50 mmol/L phosphate buffer (pH 5.0) containing 20% (v/v) tetrahydrofuran (THF). Beer's law was obeyed in the range of concentration of 2.4-21.8 microg/mL for scopolamine, 4.0-36.0 microg/mL for atropine and 2.6-23.7 microg/mL for anisodamine, respectively, and the correlation coefficients were over 0.999 (n = 6). The developed method was applied for the analysis of herb samples.