Development of a robotic-HPLC determination of riboflavin vitamers in food

The need for laboratory automation is fuelled by the demands for better nutrient composition values based on large numbers of representative food samples. A fully automated method for the simultaneous analysis of the individual riboflavin vitamers in foods has been developed. It combines robotic extraction with HPLC quantitation. The robotic method was compared with a similar manual extraction using a variety of unfortified foods that are significant dietary sources of total riboflavin (TRF). The polymer-based columns used in the HPLC separation were found to be sensitive to the total organic carbon (TOC) content of ‘HPLC-grade’ water. Several procedures of varying complexity were successfully applied in order to remove interfering artifacts from the water.