Simultaneous determination of methyl, ethyl, propyl, and butyl parabens in sweetener samples without any previous pretreatment using square wave voltammetry and multiway calibration

• Published in: Food chemistry 2021-12, Vol.365, p.130472-130472, Article 130472
• Main Authors: Dantas, Maria S.R., Lourenço, Anabel S., Silva, Amanda C., Bichinho, Kátia M., Araujo, Mario C.U.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Glassy carbon electrode; Parabens; Second-order advantage from the multiway calibration; Square wave voltammetric; Sweeteners
• ISSN: 0308-8146; 1873-7072
• DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2021.130472

•Development of new fast, sensitive, and inexpensive square wave voltammetric method.•Simultaneous determination of methyl, ethyl, propyl, and butyl parabens in sweeteners.•Achievement of second-order advantage using U-PLS/RBL models.•Overcoming of the strong overlap of voltammetric signals using multiway calibration.•Promising voltammetric method for parabens determination in other food matrices. Parabens are compounds used as chemical preservatives in cosmetics, drugs, and food. Some can cause adverse effects on human health. In this study, a square wave voltammetric method using a glassy carbon electrode was developed for simultaneous determination of methyl, ethyl, propyl, and butyl parabens in sweeteners. To overcome the strong overlap of voltammetric signals caused by calibrated and uncalibrated constituents, unfolded partial least squares with residual bilinearization (U-PLS/RBL) was used. The U-PLS/RBL calibration model was constructed and evaluated using a validation set obtained using a Taguchi design. Satisfactory and unbiased results were obtained with a linear response in the range of 0.78–4.48 μmol L−1 and recoveries from 82.64% to 121.77%. As far as the authors know, a voltammetric method that simultaneously determines four parabens in complex samples such as sweeteners without any previous pretreatment has not yet been reported in the literature.