Analysis of Water-Soluble Vitamins by High-Speed Ion-Exchange Chromatography

Abstract

High-speed liquid chromatography with superficially porous ion-exchange column packings has been used to separate and quantitatively analyze the water soluble vitamins nicotinic acid, thiamine, riboflavin, ascorbic acid, folic acid, pyridoxine, pyridoxal and pyridoxamine. Chromatograms and chromatographic conditions for these as well as the phosphoric acid esters of riboflavin and pyridoxamine are shown. The reproducibility of retention time and peak area has been demonstrated to be better than 1.5% while the lower limits of sensitivity for the test vitamin compounds were better than 50 nanograms. Advantages of the technique include fast analysis times and minimum of sample clean up. Applications of the methods to vitamin analysis of food and pharmaceutical products are discussed.