Determination of scopolamine, atropine and anisodamine in Flos daturae by capillary electrophoresis

A capillary electrophoresis method was developed for the separation and determination of tropane alkaloids in Flos daturae plants. Separation was performed on a fused silica capillary(42.1 cm × 50 µm i.d.) at an applied voltage of 20 kV. Scopolamine, atropine and anisodamine were well separated in the buffer of 50 mmol/L phosphate buffer (pH 5.0) containing 20% (v/v) tetrahydrofuran (THF). Beer's law was obeyed in the range of concentration of 2.4–21.8 µg/mL for scopolamine, 4.0–36.0 µg/mL for atropine and 2.6–23.7 µg/mL for anisodamine, respectively, and the correlation coefficients were over 0.999 ( n  = 6). The developed method was applied for the analysis of herb samples. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.