Simultaneous determination of epinephrine, uric acid and xanthine in the presence of ascorbic acid using an ultrathin polymer film of 5-amino-1,3,4-thiadiazole-2-thiol modified electrode

This paper describes the simultaneous determination of epinephrine (EP), uric acid (UA) and xanthine (XN) in the presence of ascorbic acid (AA) using electropolymerized ultrathin film of 5-amino-1,3,4-thiadiazole-2-thiol (p-ATT) modified glassy carbon (GC) electrode in 0.2 M phosphate buffer solution (pH 5). Although bare GC electrode resolves the voltammetric signals of AA and XN, it fails to resolve the voltammetric signals of EP and UA in a mixture. However, the p-ATT modified electrode not only separates the voltammetric signals of AA, EP, UA and XN with potential difference of 150, 120 and 400 mV between AA-EP, EP-UA and UA-XN, respectively but also shows higher oxidation current for these molecules. The p-ATT modified electrode exhibits excellent selectivity towards the oxidation of EP, UA and XN in the presence of 40-fold higher concentration of AA. Further, the p-ATT modified electrode was also used for the selective determination of EP in the presence of 40-fold higher concentrations of AA, UA and XN. Using amperometric method, we achieved the lowest detection of 40 nM EP and 60 nM each UA and XN. The amperometric current response was increased linearly with increasing EP concentration in the range of 4.0 × 10−8 to 4.0 × 10−5 M and the detection limit was found to be 27 × 10−11 M (S/N = 3). The practical application of the present modified electrode was demonstrated by determining the concentration of EP in epinephrine tartrate injection and XN in human urine samples.