Chiral and stable isotope analysis of synthetic cathinones

Sherlock Tai*, Calum Morrison

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In the past decade synthetic cathinones have appeared in drug markets worldwide. Chiral analysis can provide information on relative enantiomeric abundances of synthetic cathinones in their drug products, potentially giving a signature of these products and hence linking the products or excluding them from possible sources. Additionally, due to natural variations of relative stable isotopic abundances of elements, stable isotope analysis of synthetic cathinone drug products provides the stable isotopic signature of the products and hence also has potential to provide additional information for the purpose of drug intelligence. Therefore, both molecular (chirality) and physicochemical (relative stable isotopic abundances) properties are important for forensic chemists to investigate. Chiral and isotope ratio mass spectrometric analysis are becoming increasingly important to forensic chemists and therefore this review will focus on an overview of these techniques applied to the synthetic cathinones.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)251-262
Number of pages12
JournalTrAC - Trends in Analytical Chemistry
Volume86
Early online date7 Dec 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2017
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Capillary electrophoresis
  • Chiral analysis
  • Drug intelligence
  • Forensic chemistry
  • Gas chromatography
  • High performance liquid chromatography
  • Isotope ratio mass spectrometry
  • Novel psychoactive substance
  • Stable isotope analysis
  • Synthetic cathinone

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Spectroscopy

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