A novel spectrophotometric for the determination of cephalosporins using 8-hydroxy-1, 3, 6-pyrenetrisulfonic acid trisodium salt (HPTS) as a chromogenic reagent

Abstract

A simple, accurate and precise spectrophotometric method has been proposed for the determination of three cephalosporins, namely; cefixime (cefi), cephalexin (ceph) and cefotaxime sodium (cefo) in pharmaceutical formulations. The proposed method is based on the derivatization of cephalosporins with 1-hydroxy-3, 6, 8-pyrenetrisulfonic acid trisodium salt, (HPTS). The optimum experimental conditions have been studied carefully. Beer’s law is obeyed over the concentration of 0.1-0.6, 0.3-1.8 and 0.5-3 μg/mL for cefi, ceph and cefo, respectively.
The detection limits were found to be 0.03, 0.14 and 0.15 μg/ mL for cefi, ceph and cefo, respectively, with a linear regression correlation coefficient of 0.99902, 0.99728 and 0.99892 for cefi, ceph and cefo, respectively. And recovery in range form 97.57-102.45, 91.61-95.6 and 96.25-103.85 for cefi, ceph and cefo, respectively. Effects of pH, temperature, standing time and HPTS concentration on the determination of cefi, ceph and cefo, have been examined. This method is simple and can be used for the determination of cefi, ceph and cefo in pharmaceutical formulations.