Ionic liquids as mobile phase additives for separation of nucleotides in high-performance liquid chromatography

Ionic liquids are a type of salts that are liquid at low temperature ( < 100degreesC). Because of their some special properties, they have been widely used as new "green solvents" for many chemical reactions and liquid-liquid extraction in the past several years. In this paper, a new method for the separation of nucleotides is developed and the essential feature of the method is that 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium salts are used as mobile phase additives, resulting in a baseline separation of nucleotides without need of gradient elution and need of organic solvent addition as currently used in RP-HPLC. This study shows the potential application of ionic liquids as mobile phase additives in reversed-phase liquid chromatography.