Development, validation and greenness assessment of a new electro-driven separation method for simultaneous analysis of cefixime trihydrate and linezolid in their fixed dose combination

The establishment and validation of a straightforward, accurate, and eco-friendly capillary zone electrophoretic-diode array detection (CZE-DAD) procedure has been presented for concurrent measurement of two common antibiotics, namely, linezolid (LIN) and cefixime trihydrate (CEF), in their binary mixture or combined dosage form. The selected fused silica capillary has total and effective lengths equal to 58.5 cm and 50 cm, respectively, with a 50 µm internal diameter. Injections were performed utilizing 100 mM borate buffer at pH 10.2 as the background electrolyte (BGE) with a 15.0 s injection time. The finally utilized voltage was 30 kV. DAD was programmed to measure LIN at 250 nm and CEF at 285 nm. In less than 6 min, the two cited drugs were resolved at 2.51 and 5.47 min for LIN and CEF respectively. The introduced procedure had a linear response in the concentration range of 5–50 μg/mL for both analytes with correlation coefficients > 0.9999. Detection and quantification limits were 1.213 and 4.042 μg/mL, respectively, for LIN and 0.301 and 1.004 μg/mL, respectively, for CEF. Validation was conducted according to the International Council for Harmonization (ICH), concerning linearity, detection and quantitation limits, range, accuracy, precision, selectivity, and robustness. Precision was found acceptable due to the low relative standard deviation (RSD%) values that did not exceed 1.86% either for repeatability or for intermediate precision. Additionally, the adequately recovered concentrations and the low values of percentage relative error (Er%) provide evidence of the accuracy of the proposed method. On the other hand, the robustness of the introduced method was affirmed by the acceptable RSD% values that did not exceed 0.6% after deliberate changes in the following procedure parameters: buffer concentration, buffer pH, and wavelength. Finally, the ability of the presented method to quantify the two tested drugs in laboratory-prepared tablets was confirmed by the adequate recoveries (≥ 99%) utilizing the standard-addition procedure, along with the absence of any significant difference between the proposed method and the reference method as proven by the student’s t-test and the variance-ratio F-test values that did not exceed the theoretical ones. The analytical Eco-Scale and the analytical GREEness metric (AGREE) were the tools utilized for greenness assessment. This CZE procedure is the first electro-driven separation method that was utilized for the analysis of both antibiotics in their combined laboratory-prepared tablets with no interference from the co-formulated adjuvants. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13065-023-01049-3.