A simple, rapid and sensitive CE method has been proposed for the determination of gatifloxacin in biological fluid. This method is based on the ECL reaction of gatifloxacin and tris(2,2'-bipyridyl)ruthenium(II) occurred in the end-column detection cell. Under the optimal conditions, gatifloxacin can be assayed within 10 min over the concentration range of 5.0 Â 10 À8 À5.0 Â 10 À6 g/mL with the theoretical plate numbers of 18 000. The intra-day and inter-day precision of the signal intensity and the migration time shows acceptable reproducibility for the analysis of gatifloxacin. The presented method has been successfully applied to determine the concentrations of gatifloxacin in urine and blood samples after clean-up using C 18 SPE column.
IntroductionGatifloxacin, a synthetic broad-spectrum antimicrobial agent that is active against both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, is widely used for the treatment of various infections. This drug offers several advantages over previous antibiotics, including enhanced in vitro activity against clinically important pathogens and improved pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics characteristics, which may improve patient outcomes against certain bacterial pathogens, especially penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae. The absolute bioavailability of gatifloxacin is 96%, with mean peak plasma concentration of 3.1-3.6 mg/mL usually occurring 1-2 h after the ingestion of a 400 mg therapeutic dosage [1][2][3].So far, some methods such as HPLC-UV [4][5][6][7], HPLCfluorimetry [6,8] [20] have been developed for the analysis of gatifloxacin in pharmaceutical preparation, biological fluid and animal tissue. Among these, HPLC [4,6,8,9] based strategies have been most universally used for the determination of this drug in biological samples since the complex matrix may severely interfere in the analysis if effective separation process is absent. High separation efficiency, low sample amount required and short run time make CE a significant complement to HPLC for the detection of various drugs and metabolites in complex sample matrix. Furthermore, as a ''green'' technique, CE separation is commonly performed in aqueous running buffers or aqueous running buffers containing a spot of organic solvent instead of organic mobile phase in HPLC, which diminishes pollution to the environment and damage to the operator. However, the sensitivity of the reported works concerning the determination of gatifloxacin in biological sample using CE is limited due to the UV detector commonly used, in which LOQ of 5.0 Â 10 À6 and 5.0 Â 10 À7 g/mL [10][11][12] are achieved. ECL using tris(2,2 0 -bipyridyl)ruthenium(II) (Ru(bpy) 3 21 ) has been extensively applied for the analysis of various compounds containing secondary or tertiary amine [21,22]. In recent years, ECL has attracted increasing interest as CE end-column detector for separation and detection of amine containing compounds and their derivatives for its high sensitivity, simple instrument and low assay cost [23][24][25][26][27][28][29...