Quantitative Determination of Carrageenan in Infant Formulas

Abstract

An accurate and precise method was developed for the determination of carrageenan in milk-based infant formulas. Following digestion of protein with papain, carrageenan was precipitated with Hyamine 1622, a quatemary ammonium salt. The precipitate was washed to remove lactose, dissolved in sulfuric acid and the carrageenan assayed by color development with the phenol-sulfuric reagent. Filtrations and washings were facilitated with Millipore filters. Carrageenan recovery of spikedformulas averaged 99.67% for ready-to-feed products and 95.74% for concentrated products, which respectively contained 7.1% and 14.2% lactose. To obtain these accuracies the reference carrageenan must be identical to the carrageenan in the product.

Detection of Carrageenan in Cheese Using Lectin Histochemistry

“…Ziółkowska et al [51] used photometric titration to detect carrageenan. Quantitative determination of carrageenan in infant formula, chocolate milk, and ice cream has been performed using a method based on the degradation of proteins by papain and subsequent precipitation of carrageenan with Hyamine solution and addition of phenol-sulfuric acid to produce a color change in carrageenan [52,53]. Other detection methods have used included potentiometry [54], chromatography [47] or microscopic methods [17,55].…”

Potentiometric determination of some food additives and their binding to a polycationic species using polyion sensors

“…Various methods are currently applied for the determination of these polyanions. The colorimetric determination of Carr with 2-thiobarbituric acid, 13 acridine orange, 14 methylene blue, 15 alcian blue, 16 and hyamine, 17 and determination of CMC 18−20 have been reported. To the best of our knowledge, there are no reports on the determination of Xanth and Alg by using a polyion-sensitive film sensor except for our previous spectrophotometric work.…”