Enantioseparation and thermodynamic study of naphthalene derivatives, new melatoninergic agonists, on coated amylose [tris(S)-1-phenylethylcarbamate] stationary phase. Transposition to preparative scale.

This work reports a high-performance liquid chromatography normal-phase methodology to elucidate enantiomers of naphthalene derivatives, evaluated as melatoninergic agonists. For this purpose four different polysaccharide based chiral stationary phases were evaluated, namely Chiralcel OD-H (cellulose tris-3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate), Chiralcel OJ (cellulose tris-methylbenzoate), Chiralpak AD (amylose tris-3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) and Chiralpak AS (amylose tris-(S)-1-phenylethylcarbamate) with different alcoholic modifiers on different amounts in n-heptane. A temperature study was carried out, between 20 and 40 °C and the apparent thermodynamic parameters were calculated thanks to the Van't Hoff linearization. For all compounds (except 3), ΔΔH° and ΔΔS° exhibited positive values ranging from 791.2 to 9999.3 J/mol and from 3.9 to 37.8 J/K/mol respectively, indicating entropically driven separations. Optimized conditions led to goof resolution of 2.37 for compound 1 on Chiralpak AS, with heptane-2-propanol 90:10 (v/v), at a temperature of 30 °C. Then they were transposed to the preparative scale for compound 1, generating 22 mg of each enantiomer with an 80% yield. The limits of detection and of quantification were determined to allow the calculation of the enantiomeric excess. They were found with very low values, equal to 0.32 and 1.05 µ m and 0.33 and 1.11 µ m, respectively, for peaks 1 and 2 of compound 1.