Analysis of green tea catechins: comparative study between HPLC and HPCE

摘要

A comparison between a borate-phosphate-SDS based MEKC and an RP-HPLC method for the separation of seven tea catechins and gallic acid in a green tea extract is here proposed. Under optimised conditions, HPCE offered several advantages respect to time of analysis (compounds were separated within 4.5 min), sensitivity (HPCE LODs were about 20-100 times lower than HPLC ones) and solvent consumption. HPCE displayed excellent migration time repeatability (RSD% on MT <2%, and RSD% on RMT <1%), whereas HPLC showed slightly more quantification ruggedness (total amount catechins RSD% was <2% for HPLC and <6% for HPCE). This study highlights the effective possibilities of application of HPCE in the food chemistry field for routine analysis.