Determination of imipramine and trimipramine by capillary electrophoresis with electrochemiluminescence detection

The tricyclic antidepressants (TCA) imipramine (Imi) and trimipramine (Tri) were successfully analyzed by capillary electrophoresis (CE) coupling with Tris(2,2-bipyridyl) ruthenium(II)-based (Ru(bpy)32+) end-column electrochemiluminescence (ECL) detection. The addition of β-CD to the running buffer was found to enable baseline separation of the two analytes and the addition of acetonitrile (ACN) as an organic additive to improve the repeatability and sensitivity of the CE method. Under the optimized separation and detection conditions (50 mM PBS (pH = 7.0) and 2 mM Ru(bpy)32+ in the ECL detection cell, 20 mM Tris (pH = 2.0), 0.2 mM β-CD and 20% ACN (v/v) as running buffer), wide linear ranges of 0.1–5 μM and 0.1–5 μM were achieved, with the correlation coefficients of 0.9990 (n = 8) and 0.9980 (n = 8) for Imi and Tri, respectively. Detection limits 5 nM and 1 nM (S/N = 3) were obtained for Imi and Tri, respectively. The method was also successfully applied for the determination of Imi in pharmaceutical dosage form.