Vitamins

Vitamins play an important role for health. As the human organism is not able to synthesize these micronutrients by itself, he is dependatn on their supply with diet. Therefore, analysis of vitamins and vitamin data are particularly interesting for the consumer, although vitamin analysis poses a particular challenge for the analyst. This is due to their occurrence in traces, and their susceptibility to degradation. Therefore, it is essential to develop analytical methods that combine a gentle extraction with sensitive detection and that enable to compensate for inevitable losses during sample preparation. In this regard, stable isotope dilution assay offer particular advantages for vitamin analysis in foods and biological samples. Therefore, the research focus of the Chair of Analytical Food Chemistry lies on the development of these methods for vitamins.

At present, we apply stable isotope dilution assays for the vitamin group of folates in a wide range of samples and are currently developing additional methods for other vitamins.