A Simple UV Spectrophotometric Method Based on Continuous Wavelet Transform and Multivariate Calibration Model for the Concurrent Analysis of Three Water-Soluble Vitamins in Fertility Supplements.

Background: Owing to the presence of overlapping spectra in pharmaceutical components, classical spectrophotometry is hard for concurrent determination. The advance of chemometrics along with UV-Vis spectrophotometry has contributed to solving this problem.

Objective: In this study, a fast, easy, precise, accurate, low-cost, and eco-friendly spectrophotometric technique was introduced and validated for the simultaneous analysis of vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and vitamin C in fertility supplements for men and women using continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and partial least squares (PLS) techniques without using time-consuming extraction process and organic solvents.

Method: In the CWT method, the zero-crossing technique was applied to obtain the optimum points for plotting calibration curves for each component. The validation of both methods was evaluated by analyzing several mixtures with different concentrations. The efficiency of the proposed methods was also surveyed on commercial capsules.

Results: Wavelet families, including Symlet (sym2) at 230, Biorthogonal (bior1.3) at 378 nm, and Daubechies (db2) at 261, were considered for vitamins B6, B12, and C, respectively. The linear range was found to be 8-20, 8-20, and 10-25 μg/mL with the coefficient of determination (R2) equal to 0.9982, 0.9978, and 0.9701 for B6, B12, and C, respectively. Low limit of detection (LOD) (<0.09 μg/mL) and limit of quantification (LOQ) <0.9 μg/mL were achieved. The mean recovery values in synthetic mixtures were from 98.38 to 98.89% and from 99.83 to 99.99%, where root-mean-square error (RMSE) of not more than 0.4 and 0.05 using the CWT and PLS methods, respectively.

Conclusions: The obtained results from the commercial capsules, applying the suggested techniques, were compared to those yielded by the high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method using the analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. According to the results, there are no significant differences, and they were in good agreement. According to all the mentioned cases, the proposed approaches can replace the time-consuming and costly HPLC method in quality control laboratories.

Highlights: Green spectrophotometry coupling chemometrics methods were proposed. Simultaneous determination of three water-soluble vitamins in fertility supplements was done using these approaches. Rapidity, simplicity, low cost, and accuracy are the benefits of the proposed methods. A HPLC technique was used as a reference method to compare with the chemometrics methods.