Ultra-high performance liquid chromatographic determination of antioxidants in teas using inkjet-printed graphene-polyaniline electrode.

A development of ultra-high performance liquid chromatographic coupled with a novel inkjet-printed conductive ink-modified electrode for a fast and simultaneous determination of polyphenolic antioxidants was achieved. Two printing techniques were selected for fabrication and modification including (i) an in-house screen-printing method and (ii) an inkjet-printing method, respectively. A conductive ink containing graphene and polyaniline nanocomposite (G-PANI) was precisely casted onto the surface of screen-printed carbon electrode (SPCE) using a dimatix inkjet material printer. Compared to a bare SPCE, the G-PANI-modified screen-printed carbon electrode (G-PANI/SPCE) exhibited higher electrochemical sensitivity with increase (2-4 times) of peak current of each antioxidant. Moreover, four antioxidants were successfully separated and determined within 3 min using a reverse phase ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) with a mobile phase containing phosphate buffer and acetonitrile (90:10 v/v). Under an optimal detection potential at +1.2V vs. Ag/AgCl, linear calibrations and limits of detection (S/N=3) for antioxidants were found to be 0.01-10 µg mL(-1) and 1.38-1.94 ng mL(-1), respectively. Finally, this proposed method has been successfully used for the determination of antioxidants in tea samples, the results obtained from our presented method were within a highly good agreement those obtained from a standard UHPLC-UV method.