Spectrophotometric determination of carminic acid in human plasma and fruit juices by second order calibration of the absorbance spectra-pH data matrices coupled with standard addition method.

A simple analytical method based on the second-order calibration of the pH gradient spectrophotometric data was developed for assay of carminic acid (CA) in human plasma and orange juice over the concentration range of 1.5-14.0microM. The multi-way data analysis method was coupled with standard addition to encounter the significant effects of plasma and juices matrices on the acid-base behavior and UV-vis. absorbance spectra of CA. Thus, the standard addition three-way calibration data of plasma or fruit juices samples were analyzed by parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) and the concentration related scores were used to derive a standard addition plot such as one obtained in univariate standard addition method. The number of PARAFAC components was obtained utilizing different criteria such as core consistency and residual errors through pf-test implementation. The applicability of the proposed method was evaluated by analysis of human plasma and fruit juices spiked with different levels of standard CA solutions. The results confirmed the success of the proposed method in the analysis of pH gradient spectrophotometric data for determination of CA. The recoveries were between 86.7 and 106.7. Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.