Nature-Friendly Chemometrics-Assisted UV-Spectrophotometric Method for the Simultaneous Determination of Vitamins B9 and B12 in Syrup Formulation: Net Analyte Signal (NAS) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) Approaches

In this study, the UV-spectrophotometric technique by applying chemometrics methods, namely Net Analyte Signal (NAS) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) was carried out for the simultaneous determination of vitamin B9 and vitamin B12 in synthetic mixtures and the commercial syrup sample. In the net analyte signal method, the standard solutions had the Limit of Detection (LOD) and Limit of Quantitation (LOQ) of 0.2321, 0.2322, and 0.4351, 0.5402 μg/mL for vitamins B9 and B12, respectively. In addition, the mean recovery values related to the test set were obtained at 98.89% and 99.08% for vitamin B9 and vitamin B12, respectively. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) was found to be 0.2868 and 0.2319 for B9 and B12 vitamins, respectively. Cross-validation was used to select the optimum number of components in the PLS approach. The number of components was equal to 2 with the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of 4.6908 and 5.9534 for B9 and B12, respectively. The mean recovery values of the test sets in this method were reported 99.48% and 99.54% for B9 and B12 vitamins, respectively. The one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test at the 95% confidence level was implemented on a pharmaceutical sample (Feroglobin syrup). The results did not show any significant difference between the methods. The proposed methods are simple, fast, low-cost, and accurate compared to the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) technique. Also, it does not require separation steps and the use of expensive and environmentally polluting solvents.