Abstract

Many pharmaceutical products are electroactive and, therefore, can be determined by voltammetry. However, most of these substances produce signals in the same region of oxidative potentials, which makes it difficult to identify them. In this work, chemometric tools are applied to extract characteristic information not only from the peak potential of differential pulse voltammograms (DPV), but also from their evolution as a function of pH. The chemometric approach is based on principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and support vector machine discriminant analysis (SVM-DA) yielding promising results for the future discrimination of pharmaceutical products in water samples.

Highlights

  • In recent years, the increasing use of pharmaceutical products for both clinical and farming purposes and the growth of water recycling practices, urged by climate change, have considerably raised the presence of such substances and their metabolites in natural waters, wastewaters and food products [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]

  • This is usually achieved by means of chromatographic techniques, especially liquid chromatography combined with fluorescence and mass spectrometric detection [12,13,14,15]

  • The present work shows that the determination of the peak potentials of differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) signals at different pH values using commercial screen-printed electrodes could be used to discriminate unknown pharmaceutical products, mainly in natural waters and wastewaters samples and in food products cultivated using reclaimed water, if the data are processed with a chemometric method of discriminant analysis

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Summary

Introduction

The increasing use of pharmaceutical products for both clinical and farming purposes and the growth of water recycling practices, urged by climate change, have considerably raised the presence of such substances and their metabolites in natural waters, wastewaters and food products [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The determination of pharmaceutical products in water and food samples is of the highest concern This is usually achieved by means of chromatographic techniques, especially liquid chromatography combined with fluorescence and mass spectrometric detection [12,13,14,15]. These techniques are highly selective, sensitive and accurate and allow multianalyte determination. They are expensive and non-portable and require trained personnel This is why electrochemical sensors, less selective but still sensitive and much simpler, cheaper and portable, constitute a promising alternative to chromatography for the screening and monitoring of pharmaceutical products [16,17,18]. The recent popularization of commercial screen-printed electrodes (SPE) modified with a large diversity of biomolecules and nanomaterials have boosted the capabilities of electrochemical sensing in this field [19,20,21,22]

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