Comparative study on the analytical performance of three waveforms for the determination of several aminoglycoside antibiotics with high performance liquid chromatography using amperometric detection

A preliminary comparative study was carried out on the analytical performances of a new six-potential waveform and other two detection waveforms, triple-potential waveform and quadruple-potential waveform. The analytical performances compared included signal response, background noise, signal/noise ratio and signal stability. Compared with triple-potential waveform and quadruple-potential waveform, the new six-potential waveform had higher signal response, signal/noise ratio, and sensitivity. As for determination reproducibility, the six-potential waveform also exhibited a slightly better performance than the other two waveforms. Under the selected experimental conditions based on the six-potential waveform, there is a linear correlation between peak area and concentration over two to three orders of magnitude for nine aminoglycoside antibiotics with a correlation coefficients better than 0.998 and the detection limits measured as three times the peak height signal-to-noise ratio for the nine aminoglycoside antibiotics were in the range of 0.0198–0.889 μg/mL. The proposed method had been used to analyze real gentamicin sulphate drug sample.