Infusions of Mikania glomerata Sprengel (guaco) leaves are used in Brazil for the treatment of respiratory diseases. Coumarin is the chemical marker of guaco for quality control purposes. This work proposes a voltammetric methodology to determine coumarin by using a boron-doped diamond electrode. At pH 10 (0.1 mol L-1 Britton-Robinson buffer solution), coumarin is irreversibly oxidized around +1.77 V in a process predominantly controlled by diffusion. The methodology described here presented a linear range from 1.54 to 15.3 µg mL-1 with limits of detection and quantification of 0.20 and 0.62 µg mL-1, respectively. Analysis of variance confirmed the significance of the regression and the absence of lack-of-fit at the confidence level of 95%. Infusion of commercial guaco leaves was directly analyzed, and results were in agreement with high-performance liquid chromatography after applying the paired t-test at a confidence level of 95%.

<p>This work reports the development of a fast chromatographic methodology for quantitation of two phytoestrogens: daidzein (DAI), and genistein (GEN), in river water samples. The proposed method is based on high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) data, and multivariate curve resolution-alternative least square (MCR-ALS) second-order calibration. Initially, the method was evaluated analyzing a synthetic validation set; prepared based on a Taguchi design. Subsequently, the method was applied to predict the concentration of the phytoestrogens in spiked river water samples, previously pre-processed by solid phase extraction (SPE). By implementation of the present chromatographic methodology, a 50% reduction in operation time was achieved (from 7.00 to 3.25 min) when compared with previous work in the literature. Precision was achieved even in the presence of non-modeled constituents and strong background. Thus, the proposed method is a rapid and robust alternative for the quantitation of studied phytoestrogens.</p>