How Acetone Can Save Your Lab Time & Money

In most reversed phase HPLC separations today, acetonitrile is the organic solvent of choice. However, I found that use of acetone instead can have many advantages. In preparative chromatography, acetone is more volatile and therefore it is easier to obtain product from a collected fraction. In addition, its lower cost compared to acetonitrile translates to significant savings at the preparative scale. In analytical applications, it can be used as a means to change elution order in the case of some analytes. Sometimes the peak shape or efficiency may even be superior.

               I investigated the separation of a variety of test solutes using either acetonitrile or acetone. Due to the high UV cutoff of acetone, I selected analytes with strong absorption in the high UV/visible range. These analytes typically have a high degree of conjugation, such as dyes. If you’re not using a UV-based detection method though, acetone won’t be a problem for analysis of an analyte with little or no UV absorption. An example of this is our study of amino acids using acetone with LC-MS.

               In 2008–2009, there was a worldwide shortage of acetonitrile that prompted studies of alternative solvents. Often, methanol was found to be the next best choice, but it has its own drawbacks as well. In terms of safety, its toxicity is higher than acetone. Chemically, acetone is more similar to acetonitrile than methanol since both are polar aprotic solvents. For this reason, you could predict that in general retention using acetone would be comparable to acetonitrile in many instances. I found this to be the case for four of the five test solutes I tested, which showed very similar retention (Fig. 1).

               You can read about the full investigation here.

Fig. 1