Chem. Pharm. Bull. 55(6) 899—901 (2007)

nents of biomolecules, such as polysaccharides, nucleic acids, glycolipids and glycoproteins. In addition, numerous secondary metabolites in plants, such as terpenoids, steroids, and flavonoids, exist as glycosides, which conjugate with aldoses. Aldoses are optically active compounds, and confirmation of absolute configuration is required in natural product chemistry. Measurement of specific rotations of pure samples is the most reliable method, although this is impractical in many cases because only limited amounts of samples are available. Analysis using a column with a chiral stationary phase developed for the separation of enantiomers, or an HPLC system equipped with an optical rotation detector and a column specified for sugar analysis, can be applied; however, the latter method is not applicable to mixtures of Dand L-enantiomers. Identification of sugars with small optical rotation may be also difficult. Methods using capillary electrophoresis have also been developed, but these methods require specialized equipment or columns that are unfamiliar to most organic chemistry laboratories. Some methods based on conversion of aldose enantiomers to diastereomeric derivatives through coupling to an optically active reagent have been developed; however, there are not many methods applicable to the widely used HPLC systems equipped with a UV detector and C18 reversed-phase column. This paper describes a new method to discriminate between aldose enantiomers using a usual HPLC system.