Development of paper-based strip to determine uric acid in wheat flour

Abstract

The quality of the food products is often deteriorated due to contamination with uric acid and insect fragments which leads to unhygienic condition and makes it unfit for consumption. The uric acid can be detected by various techniques such as HPLC, GC-MS, sensors, and electrophoresis. But the major disadvantage with these techniques is that it is costly and takes a long time to analyse the samples. The major objective of this work is to overcome the problems by developing a paper-based strip to detect uric acid levels in food samples. The principle of the paper-based strip is based on the colour intensity developed by the formation of Prussian blue colour. Based on this principle, the colour intensity was calculated using the MATLAB coding. The colour intensity increases based on an increase in the concentration of uric acid. The linear regression model shows that the R² is about 0.993, which depicts that this model is accurate and also other parameters such as RMSE, MAPE, AIC, SBC and APC values are also in lower range. The concentration of uric acid in wheat flour was calculated using the MATLAB code. The results of the analysis and validation showed that the paper-based strip method is accurate and can be used as a cost-effective method for uric acid determination in the food industry.