Simultaneous determination of neutral and uronic sugars based on UV–vis spectrometry combined with PLS

• A method can simultaneous determination of neutral and uronic sugars is developed.
• This method has been accomplished by using partial least squares (PLS) analysis.
• Compared with univariate method, the proposed method can improve the accuracy.

A method using partial least squares (PLS) for simultaneous determination of neutral and uronic sugars was developed in this paper. This method is based on the development of the reaction between the analytes and anthrone. The calibration set was built with 25 binary solutions at the concentrations ranging from 20 to 100 μg/mL for glucose and from 10 to 50 μg/mL for glucuronic acid. An independent prediction set was utilized to check the robustness of the PLS calibration model. The root-mean-square error of prediction (RMSEP) values for neutral and uronic sugars are 1.2233 and 1.9367, respectively. The correlation coefficient for the prediction set (Rp2) values for them are 0.9971 and 0.9767, respectively. Compared with the univariate method, the proposed method improves detection accuracy. In addition, it was also applied to commercial polysaccharides and Glycyrrhiza uralensis polysaccharides (GUPs), and the results indicated that the PLS model was suitable for simultaneous determination of neutral and uronic sugars.