Triclosan article August 2007 issue of LC-GC Magazine

[Consumer Products Guy]

Just "found" August 2007 issue of LC-GC Magazine still in its plastic bag. Upon reading it, I took interest in the article about triclosan assay using SPDE and capillary GC-AED. GC-AED seems like an "interesting" choice of assay; we have used our validated HPLC assay procedure for triclosan content in liquid soap products (including competitors’ products) for over 15 years. Our procedure is simple, straightforward, and fast, involving dissolving the liquid soap sample in methanol, then filtering into an autosampler vial, and quantitation by HPLC-UV on a type-A RP-18 column, isocratic elution. Our research lab uses this on OTC Stability Study assays as well as being used at production facilities and contract manufacturers’ QC labs. The sample preparation is under 5 minutes, and each HPLC run is under 8 minutes; HPLC-UV really simplifies the assay, separates the triclosan from common consumer products fragrance ingredients. Mean recoveries of triclosan from placebo liquid soap products spiked with three different known levels of triclosan typically run 100.1%.

Prior to this, we did assay our liquid soaps for triclosan by capillary GC, after dissolving the sample in DMF using trimethylsilylation with BSTFA. Author did a ton of work to investigate his assay procedure, but I’d argue that it’s not very amenable to industry, and not inexpensive or easy. In industry, we look at all aspects in the investigation stage; on the other hand, we rarely publish these techniques because of proprietary property reasons. Maybe author was trying justify purchase of GC-AED????

[krickos]

Well,
the purpose behind some articles are sometimes "unknown"

Actually we had an GC-AED on our "to-buy" list but after some reorganizations and that Agilent let over the support of the AED to another company we never got to the buying point but some R&D collegues use it.

GC-AED benefits/comments from pharma/investigational point of view:
*GC-AED is a powerful tool in structure elucidations as a complement to other techniques
*GC-AED can provide assay or elemental composition of compounds in mixtures when no reference material is available
*In Theory: The RF for an element in two different compounds = 1.00
*In practice: The RF for an element in two different compounds ~ 1.0
*High sensitivity and element specific analysis provides useful information