Development and Validation of an Effective and Sensitive Technique for Nitrate Determination in Fruits and Vegetables Using Hplc/Pda

This study aims to develop an effective and sensitive HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) method to determine the nitrate concentration in fruits and vegetables (F&V) using a C18 column (ZORBAX Eclipse XDB-C18, 80Å, 250 × 4.6 mm, 5 µm­­ (Agilent Technologies)) maintained at 40 0C, a mobile phase made up of methanol and buffer (pentane sulfonic acid sodium salt solution), and a Photo Diode Array Detector (PDA) at 225 nm. The developed method is validated in terms of selectivity, linearity, accuracy, precision, suitability, the limit of detection (LOD), and the limit of quantification (LOQ) according to the European Union Decision 2002/657/EC. The result revealed that a ratio of 30: 70 of the organic modifier methanol and buffer with pH 2.8 shows the highest efficiency. The calibration curve shows linearity with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.9985. The LOD and LOQ were found to be 2.26 mg/kg and 7.46 mg/kg. The recovery was in the range of 98.96% to 100.21%. Thus, our developed method is fully validated and can determine the nitrate content in fruits and vegetables