Simultaneous determination of glucose, fructose and lactose in food samples using a continuous-flow chemiluminescence method with the aid of artificial neural networks.

In this study, a simple continuous-flow chemiluminescence (CL) system was developed for simultaneous determination of glucose, fructose and lactose in ternary mixtures of reducing sugars without previous separation. This method was based on the different kinetics of the individual sugars in the oxidation reaction with potassium ferricyanide. The known luminol-K(3)Fe(CN)(6) CL system was used to measure the kinetic data of the system. The CL intensity was measured and recorded every second from 1 to 300 s. The data obtained were processed chemometrically using an artificial neural network. The relative standard errors of prediction for three analytes were <5%. The proposed method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of the three sugars in some food samples.