A robotic-flow injection approach to the fully automated determination of starch in food

A fully automated method for the determination of starch in foodstuff was developed. The method is based on the standard procedure involving leaching of sugars from the sample, hydrolysis of the analyte, and colorimetric determination of the hydrolysis products (sugars) by the neocuproine method. A focused microwave digester is used as a peripheral for the robotic station in order to expedite analyses by accelerating the hydrolysis step. The station is connected to a flow injection manifold, which minimizes the dilution and derivatization times. In this way, duplicate analyses of three solid samples take 5 h rather than 15 h required when the whole analytical sequence is performed by the robotic station and 5 h per sample taken by the manual method.