Simultaneous detection of water-soluble vitamins using the High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) - a review

The water-soluble vitamins (WSV): ascorbic acid (vitamin C), thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), panthothenic acid (B5), pyridoxine, and pyridoxal (B6), folic acid (B9), biotin(B8) , and B12 are very essential in the diet of humankind. As a result of ever increasing pressures from both consumers and legal enforcers, to specify accurately nutritive compositions of WSV that are present in food materials, many researchers have attempted to fill this niche through the provision of highly sensitive and rapid high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) procedures. In view of the health benefits of WSV, a replete of HPLC methods have been developed for simultaneous determination of their contents in nature and fortified food samples, nutritional supplements, as well as blood plasmas. The rate of losses of these vitamins during food processing and analysis, in addition to their transient dynamics, presents complexities in developing a highly sensitive HPLC procedure for their simultaneous separations and assays. This review critically assesses the different HPLC procedures developed by researchers and available in the open literature for simultaneous determination of water-soluble vitamins (WSV) in dried tropical fruits materials. The study revealed that not a single chromatographic run developed by researchers can simultaneously elute all the WSV at a time. However, the HPLC procedures that are capable of determining all the WSV were coupled with electrospray ionization mass spectroscopy (ESI-MS), thus making the set-up expensive