Abstract:

A method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of four water-soluble vitamins C, B1, B2 and B6 in almond by high performance liquid chromatography. The contents of vitamins C, B1, B2 and B6 in almonds in Pucheng County, Shaanxi Province were determined under optimized conditions as follows. In the first step, the sample was prepared by acid hydrolysis. In the second step, the separation was performed on an Inertsil ODS-3 column (25 cm×4.6 mm i.d., 5.0 μm) with a mobile phase of 0.05 mol/L KH2PO4 (pH 6.0)-methanol (70∶30, v/v) and a detection wavelength at 265 nm. The linear ranges of four vitamins were within 5.0-50.0 mg/L (r=0.9990-0.9997). At the spike level ranged between 5.0-20.0 mg/kg, the average recoveries of the four vitamins in the Pucheng almond ranged from 91.77% to 99.30% with relative standard deviations between 0.31% and 1.98%. For vitamins B2 and B1, the contents were found to be 4.27-4.53 mg/kg and 0.799-0.838 mg/kg, respectively, while vitamins C and B6 were not discovered in Pucheng almonds. The method is simple, rapid, reproducible and accurate.

Key words: almond , water-soluble vitamin, high performance liquid chromatography