Research Article
Simple and Fast Determination of Ammonia in Tobacco
Eugene Jansen*, Piet Beekhof, Johannes Cremers and Reinskje TalhoutCentre for Health Protection, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands
- *Corresponding Author:
- Eugene Jansen
Centre for Health Protection
National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
PO Box 1, 3720 BA Bilthoven, the Netherlands
Tel: +31-302742940
E-mail: eugene.jansen@rivm.nl
Received date: December 26, 2013; Accepted date: January 23, 2014; Published date: January 25, 2014
Citation: Jansen E, Beekhof P, Cremers J, Talhout R (2013) Simple and Fast Determination of Ammonia in Tobacco. J Anal Bioanal Tech 5: 178. doi: 10.4172/2155-9872.1000178
Copyright: © 2013 Jansen E, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The presence of ammonia in tobacco is an important factor for the absorption of nicotine, and for product taste. The determination of ammonia in tobacco is usually performed by ion chromatography with conductivity detection devices.
Here a new method is presented to measure the concentration of ammonia in tobacco based on an automated enzymatic method. This method is easy to perform and can be used on routine clinical analyzers. The enzymatic ammonia determination showed an intra-assay and inter-assay variation of 4-7 and 5-8%, respectively as determined with 3 brands of cigarettes. A comparison with the established HPLC-IC method gave similar results with respect to both concentrations in cigarettes and the of the method. In one working day 50-60 samples of cigarettes or tobacco can be processed and analyzed.
