PARAFAC and MCR-ALS approaches to the pKa determination of benzoic acid and its derivatives

Abstract

In general, the identification of biological activities of a molecule requires the observation of its physicochemical characteristics with its molecular interactions in an organism. The acid-base ionization constant (or pKa) is one of the key parameters that shows the physicochemical behaviors of molecules used in pharmaceuticals, foods, cosmetics etc. Therefore, the development of new methods (or approaches) is necessary to get simple, rapid, inexpensive and reliable determination of the acidity constants of active and inactive ingredients used in commercial products. In this paper, new UV spectroscopic methods were developed for the first time, by applying parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) and multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) to the pH-UV spectral data arrays for determining the pKa values of benzoic acid and its five derivatives (4-fluorobenzoic acid, thiosalicylic acid, anthranilic acid, phthalic acid, 4-aminobenzoic acid). The pH profiles obtained by the PARAFAC and MCR-ALS decomposition of the pH-UV data arrays were used for the quantitative estimation of the acid-base ionization constants for the investigated compounds without classical titration procedure. We concluded that the proposed PARAFAC and MCR-ALS provided us an opportunity for simple and rapid pKa determination of relevant compounds, which have functional importance in pharmaceutical and food industries.