Generic nonextractive spectrophotometric method for determination of 4-quinolone antibiotics by formation of ion-pair complexes with beta-naphthol.

This paper describes the development of a generic spontaneous nonextractive spectrophotometric method for determination of 13 pharmaceutically important 4-quinolone antibiotics. The method was based on the formation of yellow-colored water-soluble ion-pair complexes between 2% (w/v) beta-naphthol reagent and each of the studied drugs in sulfuric acid medium at room temperature. The formed ion-pair chromogens have maximum absorption peaks in the range of 365-391 nm. The concentrations of the reagents and the experimental conditions affecting the reaction were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, linear relationships with good linear coefficients (0.9987-0.9995) were found between the absorbance and concentration of the investigated drugs in the range of 10-350 microg/mL. The assay limits of detection and quantitation were 1-9.9 and 3.4-32.9 microg/mL, respectively. The precision of the method was satisfactory; the values of relative standard deviations did not exceed 2%. The proposed method was successfully applied to the analysis of the investigated drugs in pure and pharmaceutical dosage forms with good accuracy and precision; the percentages of label claim ranged from 97.8-102.8 +/- 0.35-1.60%. The results obtained by the proposed spectrophotometric method were comparable with those obtained by the official or reported methods. The proposed method is superior to all the previously reported ion-pair formation-based methods in terms of simplicity because it did not involve extraction procedures for the ion-pair complex. Therefore, this method might be recommended for routine use in quality control laboratories for analysis of the investigated 4-quinolone antibiotics in their pure forms, as well as in pharmaceutical dosage forms.