Determination of dissociation constants of aristolochic acid I and II by capillary electrophoresis with carboxymethyl chitosan-coated capillary

Aristolochic acid-I and aristolochic acid-II have been proved to be the main bioactive and toxic component in Aristolochia plants. As a result, the determination of their dissociation constants, which are important property parameters for weak acids, is highly desired for related pharmacological and toxicological studies. In this work, the dissociation constant values of aristolochic acid-I and aristolochic acid-II were determined by capillary electrophoresis using carboxymethyl chitosan-coated capillary, based on their electrophoretic mobilities by using nonlinear regression as well as linear regression, showing that the two models give comparable results. The data were also compared with those obtained by capillary electrophoresis with polybrene-coated capillary, and no conspicuous difference was observed. The correlation coefficients were all higher than 0.998 for both linear and nonlinear regression model. The pKa values were found to be 3.3 ± 0.1 for aristolochic acid-I and 3.2 ± 0.1 for aristolochic acid-II.