Original research articleA validated, rapid, simple and economical high-performance liquid-chromatography method to quantify palm tocopherol and tocotrienols

- The HPLC method to quantify tocols was rapid (last eluted peak ended at 8.8 min).
- The method had low solvent consumption (0.8 L/min).
- The method was simple with direct sample injection following dilution in n-hexane.
- The method was validated to assure its precision, accuracy and reliability.

A normal-phase high-performance liquid-chromatography (HPLC) method was developed and validated to determine and quantify α-tocopherol (T), α-, γ- and δ-tocotrienol (T3) in palm oil. The developed method was simple with direct sample injection into common ultraviolet (UV) detector and silica column. Analysis time was short (the last eluted peak ended at 8.8 min) and lesser mobile phase was consumed (0.8 mL/min). The relative standard deviation (RSD) was less than 7.11% for the response factor, coefficient of determination (R2) was more than 0.998, peak resolution was more than 2.68, tailing factor was less than 1.35, percentage recoveries at three levels were in the range of 90.11-103.79%, limit of detection (LOD) was in the range of 100.28-175.24 μg/L and limit of quantification (LOQ) was in the range of 334.28-584.15 μg/L. The developed method was used to quantify the amount of the four major tocols in crude palm oil (CPO), refined palm oil (RPO), crude palm olein and stearin. Palm olein had 1.3 times more tocols than stearin and as much as 85.7% of the total tocols was recovered in palm olein. The potential of this method to elute the four T and four T3 isomers was also tested with resolution of more than 2.28.