“…Consequently, less-polar compounds have a strong interaction with the apolar stationary phase, and are more retained on the column than polar analytes (e.g., most primary metabolites such as carbohydrates, glycolytic intermediates, and sugar phosphates) (Dunn and Ellis, 2005). High performance anion-exchange liquid chromatography (HPAEC) with pulsed amperometric detection (PAD) has been widely used in the past for the analysis of such highly polar metabolites, including underivatized carbohydrate-related compounds and other intermediary metabolites from animal tissues (Swezey, 1995), Escherichia coli cell extracts (Bhattacharya et al, 2005), potato (de Bruijn, Visser, & Vreugdenhil, 1999), and also from A. thaliana tissues (Sekiguchi et al, 2004). Nonetheless, the mobile phases used with commercial HPAEC systems (Dionex) contain high concentrations of sodium hydroxide and sodium acetate, and, therefore, are not MScompatible.…”