Determination of Vitamin B6 in Cooked Sausages

A reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method has been described for the determination of various active forms of vitamin B6 in meat products. Different extracting agents were tested to solubilize fully the analyte for quantification. The best data were obtained by extracting the samples with 5% (w/v) metaphosphoric acid. Separation by HPLC was performed with fluorescence detection (excitation, 290 nm; emission, 395 nm), on a 10 cm × 0.46 cm i.d. Hypersil BDS C18 5 μm column using a mixture of 50 mM phosphate buffer (pH 3.2) and acetonitrile (99:1, v/v) as mobile phase. Precision of the method was 0.5% (within a day) and 4.3% (between days). The detection limits were 0.020 mg/100 g for pyridoxal and pyridoxamine, 0.017 mg/100 g for pyridoxamine phosphate, 0.500 mg/100 g for pyridoxal phosphate, and 0.033 mg/100 g for pyridoxol, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 3. The recovery ranged from 92.0 to 100.0%. Keywords: Vitamin B6; pyridoxine; pyridoxal; pyridoxamine; cooked sausages; HPLC