Using silica nanoparticles as a catalyst carrier to the highly sensitive determination of thiamine

The preparation and utilization of silica nanoparticles as a carrier of tetra-substituted carboxyl iron phthalocyanine (TCFePc, a novel mimetic peroxidase) is reported in this article. Compared with free TCFePc, the experimental results indicated that the TCFePc entrapped in silica nanoparticles exhibited an improved catalytic activity and good reusability. By using tetra-substituted carboxyl iron phthalocyanine-silica nanoparticles (TCFePc-SiO2 Nps) to catalyze the oxidation reaction of thiamine by hydrogen peroxide, a new fluorimetric method was developed for the quantitative analysis of thiamine in pharmaceutical tablets. The influences of different conditions, such as the medium acidity, the reaction time and temperature, the concentrations of reagents and foreign substances, were all investigated. Under the optimum conditions, the calibration graph for thiamine was linear over the range of 5.0 x 10(-9)-1.0 x 10(-6) mol L-1, with a detection limit of 2.0 x 10(-9) mol L-1. The proposed method was successfully applied to the direct analysis of thiamine in two kinds of pharmaceutical tablets, and offered the advantages of simple pretreatment, rapid determination, high sensitivity and good reusability. Hence, as a carrier of the mimetic enzyme, the silica nanoparticles are effective for enzymatic reaction processes. This method is supposed to be hopeful for the determination of thiamine in other complex raw materials. (C) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.