Rapid determination of hippuric acid as an exposure biomarker of toluene using a colorimetric assay and comparison with high-performance liquid chromatography.

Occupational exposure to toluene is associated with health risks that require reliable monitoring methods. Hippuric acid (HA), a urinary metabolite of toluene, serves as a valuable biomarker for such exposure. Colorimetric methods for the quantitative determination of HA have gained prominence due to their simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and suitability for field application. In the present study, a simple colorimetric technique was optimized for the determination of HA in the urine sample, and compared with a usual HPLC technique. The central composite design (CCD) was applied to examine the effective parameters on the colorimetric determination of HA. The calibration curve for HA was established within the concentration range of 6 to 100 mg L-1 with R2 = 0.97. The detection limit (LOD) and quantification limit (LOQ) were determined to be 1.8 mg L-1 and 6 mg L-1 respectively. The relative standard deviation (RSD%) was less than 5%, and the recovery% (R%) was 90.5-100.1. The overall results showed good agreement between the colorimetric and HPLC results. There was a significant relationship between the results obtained from HPLC and colorimetric methods especially for higher concentration levels of HA (≥ 500 mg/g creatinine). In conclusion, our optimized colorimetric method is a simple, cost-effective, and rapid method for determination of HA in occupational exposure, which is comparable with the HPLC technique.

Photodegradation study of nystatin by UV-Vis spectrophotometry and chemometrics modeling.

Nystatin, one of the tetraene antifungal antibiotics, is very sensitive to light. Thus, when nystatin is exposed to natural daylight, it is photodegraded to products of lower biological activity. In this work, the photodegradation kinetics of nystatin was monitored by a UV-Vis spectrophotometry method. The absorbance spectra of the nystatin, exposed to a 366 nm UV lamp, were recorded at different periods of time. By application of factor analysis to the absorbance data matrix, three absorbing chemical species, coexisting in the reaction system, were detected. The soft-modeling multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares analysis of the evolutionary absorbance data revealed that nystatin undergoes photodegradation in a two-step consecutive manner. Hard-modeling data analysis suggested that reaction has first-order kinetics in the first step and zero-order kinetics in the second step. The reaction rate constants of the first and second steps were estimated as 0.0929 (+/-0.0076) and 0.0052 (+/-0.0016)/min, respectively. Finally, the pure spectra of the resolved chemical species were calculated.

Spectrophotometric study of complex formation equilibria in the presence of interference using hard-soft net analyte signal method: application to drug-metal complexation.

In this article, the ability of a new and efficient hard-soft method, previously proposed by our research group, is reported for modeling of the complex formation equilibria in the presence of interferences. This method is based on the net analyte signal (NAS) concept, which is a part of total signal that is directly related to the concentration of the component of interest. It monitors the concentration changes of any chemical species involved in the evolutionary process without requiring any pure spectra or having previous knowledge about the presence of the interferences. The proposed hard-soft method based on net analyte signal (HS-NAS) only needs a chemical model for one of the species involved in the reaction under study. The reliability of the method was examined by applying it to the measured data and spectrum of the known real systems of Fe(2+)-azithromycin and Ca(2+)-tetracycline.