A comparison of deconvolution methods as applied to high performance liquid chromatography–diode array detector–electrospray mass spectrometry of 2- and 3-hydroxypyridine at varying pH in the presence of severely tailing peak shapes

Triply coupled high performance liquid chromatography–diode array detection–electrospray mass spectrometry of a mixture of 2- and 3-hydroxypyridine were recorded at pH 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2. At each pH the resolution changes with almost complete overlap at pH 5.1. A variety of chemometric methods including raw, normalised and standardised principal component analysis (PCA), derivatives, evolving factor analysis (EFA), fixed size window EFA, spectral similarity indices (SSI) and peak ratios are applied to the data for both detectors and all pH. Methods of deconvolution are also applied to both the diode array and mass spectral data.