“…Attempts have been made by different research groups to characterize commercially available polypeptide antibiotics [7] such as gramicidin [8], polymyxin B [9,10,11,12,13], polymyxin E [9,10,14,15,16,17,18], and bacitracin [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31], which were the subject of our investigation. In most cases structural elucidation was carried out after time-consuming isolation and purification procedures but despite considerable efforts not all impurities were characterized and in the last few years, with the development of better separating liquid chromatography (LC) methods, more unidentified peaks have been separated and remain unidentified [32,33,34,35]. Checking the molecular structure of impurities and degradants is an important step in the quality control of a drug.…”