6/23/22

Dear Nurin,

I don't think you can get much of a signal from xylitol on an HPLC's DAD. Sugars/sugar alcohols don't absorb much UV light. However, you can easily see xylitol using a refractive index detector (RID). Does your HPLC have one? I do a lot of HPLC and most of my samples contain glycerol, glucose and fructose which are easily detectable at the microgram level. A few months ago, I tested our HPLC column to see if it could resolve sorbitol from xylose, and it was able to do so, giving good peaks. We used a Bio-Rad fermentation monitoring column and 5 mM H2SO4 as the mobile phase. Chemically and structurally, sorbitol and xylitol are very similar. It might be worth a try.

I hope this information helps you.

Bill Colonna Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA [email protected]