Content area
Full Text
Article history
Received: 29 June 2015
Received in revised form:
23 March 2016
Accepted: 4 April 2016
Keywords
Vitamin C
Ascorbic acid
Citrus fruits
High performance liquid
chromatography
Titration
Abstract
Vitamin C is one of the essential vitamins for human and animal. Many methods were developed for the determination of vitamin C such as spectrophotometry, electrophoresis, titration, and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). This study aims to compare vitamin C content of citrus fruits (orange, grapefruit, lemon, lime, kaffir lime and musk lime) using indophenol titration and HPLC-PDA methods. In the titration method, orange has the highest vitamin C content (58.30 mg/100g) followed by grapefruit (49.15 mg/100g), lemon (43.96 mg/100g), kaffir lime (37.24 mg/100g), lime (27.78 mg/100g) and musk lime (18.62 mg/100g). While, in the HPLC method orange also leads with the highest vitamin C content (43.61 mg/100g) followed by lemon (31.33 mg/100g), grapefruit (26.40 mg/100g), lime (22.36 mg/100g), kaffir lime (21.58 mg/100g) and musk lime (16.78 mg/100g). Orange is the best source of vitamin C while musk and kaffir lime have lower content. Significant differences were observed in vitamin C of samples by both methods. Both methods are suitable for the determination of vitamin C, however HPLC method is more accurate, precise and specific.
© All Rights Reserved
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
Introduction
Vitamin C, also is known as ascorbic acid is one of the most important vitamins and essential for human and animal life. This water soluble vitamin contributes to many health benefits such as prevention of scurvy and cancer, relief from common cold, stimulate collagen synthesis and play a significant role in wound healing process (Iqbal et al., 2004). According to Teucher et al. (2004), vitamin C helps to enhance availability and absorption of iron from non-heme sources. Vitamin C also has antioxidant properties since it can easily lose the electron to neutralize and inhibit free radicals from being oxidized in preventing cell damage. It is also commonly used as food additive which acts as antioxidant (Whitney and Rolfes, 2008).
Vitamin C is an organic compound consists of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (Chinnici et al., 2005). The terms vitamin C is not only used for ascorbic acids, but it includes all compounds exhibiting biological activity such as oxidized, ester and...