Acetonitrile and methanol are the most popular solvents employed in analytical HPLC, but they suffer from a number of drawbacks from the environmental point of view. Alternative, greener mobile phases employing methanol or the less toxic solvent ethanol as the sole organic solvent are proposed in this paper, and applied to the problem of the separation of β-carbolines on C18-stationary phases. The use of β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) and (2-hydroxypropyl)-β-cyclodextrin (HPβ-CD) as mobile phase additives allowed us to increase the proportion of water in the mobile phases without loss in the resolution or efficiency of the separations, leading initially to a considerable reduction of the proportion of methanol in the mobile phase (from 70% to 50%) and at a later stage, to the development of a mobile phase containing only 30% of ethanol. The β-carboline–cyclodextrin association constants were determined by HPLC, and the inclusion complexes were also characterized by 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR and 2D-ROESY experiments, and these studies were used to explain the chromatographic behaviour. The new chromatographic methodology developed was validated and applied to the quantitation of β-carboline derivatives in spiked human serum samples. For the extraction of β-carboline alkaloids from serum samples, liquid–liquid extraction (LLE) and solid-phase extraction (SPE) procedures were compared. It was concluded that the combination of a pre-treatment procedure (ionic exchange SPE) with a water-enriched chromatographic separation leads to a promising, environmentally friendly new methodology.
                                    乙腈和
甲醇是分析型 HPLC 中最常用的溶剂,但从环境角度来看,它们存在许多缺点。本文提出了采用
甲醇或毒性较小的溶剂
乙醇作为唯一有机溶剂的替代绿色流动相,并将其应用于 C18 固定相上的 β-咔啉分离问题。使用 β-
环糊精 (β-CD) 和 (2-羟丙基)-β-
环糊精 (HPβ-CD) 作为流动相添加剂,使我们能够增加流动相中
水的比例,而不会损失分离度或效率。这些分离最初导致流动相中
甲醇的比例大幅降低(从 70% 降至 50%),并在后期开发出仅含有 30% 
乙醇的流动相。通过HPLC测定了β-咔啉-
环糊精缔合常数,并通过1H-NMR、13C-NMR和2D-ROESY实验对包合物进行了表征,这些研究用于解释色谱行为。开发的新色谱方法经过验证并应用于加标人血清样品中 β-咔啉衍
生物的定量。对于从血清样品中提取 β-咔啉
生物碱,比较了液液萃取 (LLE) 和固相萃取 (
SPE) 程序。结论是,预处理程序(离子交换 
SPE)与富
水色谱分离的结合产生了一种有前途的、环境友好的新方法。