HPLC determination of pantothenic acid in royal jelly

Although royal jelly constitutes one of the richest natural sources of pantothenic acid (vitamin B-5), a reliable and validated chromatographic method to determine this analyte in this matrix has yet to be described in the literature. In this work we present an original RP-HPLC procedure to measure the concentration of pantothenic acid in royal jelly. A sample pre-treatment is needed to prevent the interference of high protein concentration in the matrix. The method has been validated in terms of LoD, LoQ, linearity, precision (repeatability and reproducibility) and bias. Finally, the whole procedure was tested on a number of samples of royal jelly from different origins, providing concentration values ranging from 120 +/- 30 to 565 +/- 40 mg kg(-1) of pantothenic acid.