Automated Determination of Pharmaceutically and Biologically Active Thiols by Sequential Injection Analysis: A Review

Abstract

The present review article presents and discusses automated sequential injection (SI) based methods for the determination of pharmaceutically and biologically important thiols, namely cysteine, N-acetylcysteine, penicillamine, glutathione and captopril. The review intends to cover a range of ten years of published research on this topic (2000 - 2009). The methods are classified according to the detection systems in three categories, namely spectrophotometric, fluorimetric and electroanalytical. The determination principles of the methods are discussed and the main analytical figures of merit are tabulated.