
A recent paper from Merck looks at ethanol as a possible replacement solvent for acetonitrile (ACN) in hplc analysis. Run times are generally a bit longer with ethanol in place of ACN which means less runs per hour/day. The other slight drawback with ethanol is that it has a higher UV cut off than ACN. This means that detection of substrates with low UV absorption are likely to be poor at best. However, for compounds with good UV absorption like most drug substances this will not be a problem.
C.J. Welch, T. Brkovic, and W. Shafer, Green Chem., 2009, 1232-1238.















