Polarimetric Analytical Method: The Importance in the Determination of Pharmaceutical Active and Inactive Ingredients

Molecules that make up living things or metabolized by living things tend to be chiral. Chiral compounds (optical isomers), are a specific case of stereoisomers and are distinguished by having enantiomeric counterparts with identical chemical properties in nonchiral environments however, differing in the way they rotate a plane of polarized light. As chirality becomes more appreciated amongst research scientists, tools to measure it increase in importance in analytical laboratories. Such tools involve the use of polarimeters and polarimetric liquid chromatographic (LC) detectors.