Simultaneous Determination of B Group Vitamins in Supplemented Food Products by High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Diode Array Detection

Abstract

A simple HPLC-DAD method was developed and validated to determine B group vitamin content (thiamine, riboflavin, nicotinamide, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine and folic acid) in supplemented food samples, i.e., infant formula, cereal, low-calorie food, a multi-vitamin pill and a vitamin drink. In this study, the most significant advantages were simultaneous determination of the six B group vitamins in various food matrices and a small number of sample treatment steps that required only an organic solvent, acetonitrile. Moreover, this method prevents reduction of column durability, because the mobile phase does not contain ion-pairing reagents. Analytes were separated on a Develosil RPAQUEOUS C(30) (4.6 mm x 250 mm, 5 pm particle size) column with a gradient elution of acetonitrile and 20 mM phosphate buffer (pH 3.0) at a flow rate between 0.8 and 1.0 mL/min. Detection was performed at 275 nm, except for that of pantothenic acid (205 nm). The calibration curves for all six vitamins showed good linearity with correlation coefficients (r(2)) higher than 0.995. The developed method was validated with respect to linearity, intra- and inter-day accuracy and precision, limit of quantification (LOQ), recovery and stability. The method showed good precision and accuracy, with intra- and inter-assay coefficients of variation less than 15% at all concentrations. The recovery was carried out according to the standard addition procedure, with yields ranging from 89.8 to 104.4%. This method was successfully applied to the determination of vitamin B groups in supplemented food products.