Development of a high-performance liquid chromatography method for simultaneous quantification of sixteen polyphenols and application to tomato

The main purpose of the current work was to develop a new method to evaluate and quantify sixteen polyphenol compounds from tomato fruit using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The separation of 16 polyphenols from tomato fruit was achieved in < 60 min by using a Waters Symmetry C18 column (250 x 4.6 mm i. d, 5 <mu>m particle sizes) with a gradient system of ultrapure water (1 % acetic acid) and 100 % methanol, a temperature of 30 C-degrees, an injection volume of 10 mu L and a flow rate of 1.1 mL/min, respectively. The analytical characteristics of evaluation method provide sufficient sensitivity for all tomato polyphenols compounds within normal range 0.1-20 mu g center dot mL(-1) (R-2 >= 0.999) with 0.069-0.365 mu g center dot mL(-1) LOD, and 0.171-1.106 mu g center dot mL(-1) LOQ, with good system suitability (<2 % RSD of retention time, peak area, and tailing factor, 6,000-1,336,000 N, and >1.5 peak resolution), <10 % RSD of precision, stability, repeatability, and robustness, and 99.2 - 105.0 % of recovery. The applicability of this method was demonstrated by the determination of polyphenols in nine cultivars of tomatoes. The results showed that '184 ' possessed the highest content of total polyphenols (1249.53 mu g center dot g(-1) DW) followed by 'Disease resistance 184 ' (1064.93 mu g center dot g(-1) DW). The main polyphenol components were rutin, quercetin, gallic acid, chlorogenic acid, 2,5-dihydroxy benzoic acid, caffeic acid and benzoic acid in tomato fruits. In conclusion, this novel HPLC method is useful and acceptable to analyze polyphenols in tomato fruit.