Design and Fabrication of Electrochemical Flow-Through Cell for the Determination of Tetracycline Antibiotics Using FIA-Amperometry

Abstract

The home-made electrochemical flow-through cell was designed and fabricated for the
determination of tetracycline antibiotics (tetracycline, chlortetracycline, and doxycycline) in
pharmaceutical preparation using FIA-amperometry. A gold disc electrode, a Ag/AgCl electrode and
a platinum electrode were used as the working, reference and auxiliary electrodes, respectively. The
optimum conditions used potassium dihydrogen phosphate solution, pH = 2, as a supporting
electrolyte, were the flow rate of 0.4 mL/min and the constant applied potential of 840 mV versus
Ag/AgCl. The linear calibration curves over the range of 10-30 mg/L for tetracycline and
doxycycline, 10-60 mg/L for chlortetracycline were obtained. The detection limit was 6.6-9.0 mg/L.
The proposed method has been successfully applied to the determination of tetracycline,
chlortetracycline, and doxycycline in commercial pharmaceutical formulations and the percentage
recoveries were found to be 92.2-106.0.

Keywords: Electrochemical flow-through cell, Tetracycline antibiotics, FIA-amperometry