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Use of an Online Extraction Technique Coupled to Liquid Chromatography for Determination of Caffeine in Coffee, Tea, and Cocoa

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Abstract

Caffeine is the most widely studied psychoactive molecule in history due to its many pharmacological activities and a high number of biological and physiological effects. In literature, there is a great number of applications that describe extraction, identification, and quantification of caffeine in foods and beverages. For this purpose, an extraction step is followed by an analytical technique for the identification and quantification of caffeine. This work proposes an innovative method in which sample preparation, separation, and detection steps are unified in a single step. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on the determination of caffeine in coffee, tea, and cocoa by means of an online extraction coupled to a liquid chromatographic system equipped with a photodiode array detector. The developed methodology was validated in terms of sensitivity, detection limits, accuracy, and precision. The advantages of this technique are (i) a significant reduction of analysis time (more than 70%) and of solvents used (the extraction step is integrated in the chromatographic analysis), (ii) the whole procedure is thus completely automated drastically reducing possible operator errors to occur, and (iii) easily realized by using a conventional monodimensional liquid chromatography system.

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Acknowledgements

Authors wish to thank Shimadzu Corporation for constantly supporting their research work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Via Álvaro del Portillo 21, 00128, Rome, Italy

    Marina Russo, Paola Dugo, Chiara Fanali, Laura Dugo, Luigi Mondello & Laura De Gara

  2. Dipartimento di “Scienze Chimiche, Biologiche, Farmaceutiche ed Ambientali”, University of Messina-Polo Annunziata, Viale Annunziata, 98168, Messina, Italy

    Paola Dugo, Mariosimone Zoccali & Luigi Mondello

  3. Chromaleont S.r.L., Viale Boccetta 70, 98122, Messina, Italy

    Paola Dugo & Luigi Mondello

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  1. Marina Russo
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  2. Paola Dugo
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Correspondence to Marina Russo.

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Conflict of Interest

Marina Russo declares that she has no conflict of interest. Paola Dugo declares that she has no conflict of interest. Chiara Fanali declares that she has no conflict of interest. Laura Dugo declares that she has no conflict of interest. Mariosimone Zoccali declares that he has no conflict of interest. Luigi Mondello declares that he has no conflict of interest. Laura De Gara declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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Russo, M., Dugo, P., Fanali, C. et al. Use of an Online Extraction Technique Coupled to Liquid Chromatography for Determination of Caffeine in Coffee, Tea, and Cocoa. Food Anal. Methods 11, 2637–2644 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-018-1247-5

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