[Determination of the azetidine-2-carboxylic acid from lily of the valley].

This paper reports the separation and determination of the azetidine-2-carboxylic acid in lily of the valley by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with post-column derivatization and fluorescence detection. The operating conditions were cation exchange resin column (30 cm x 0.4 cm i.d.) with buffer solution A [1.96% (mass fraction) sodium citrate solution pH 3.10 +/- 0.02] and B [2.1% (mass fraction) sodium nitrate solution pH 9.60 +/- 0.02] as mobile phase at flow-rate of 0.4 mL/min, gradient elution, column temperature 65 degrees C, detection wavelength lambda ex = 338 nm and lambda em = 425 nm. The retention time of azetidine-2-carboxylic acid was 5.86 minutes. The recovery was 96.4% and coefficient of variation was 0.94%. This method is simple, rapid and sensitive.