Authors: Jonans Tusiimire Jennifer Wallace Mark Dufton John Parkinson Carol J Clements Louise Young Jin Kyu Park Jong Woon Jeon David G Watson
Publish Date: 2015/03/08
Volume: 407, Issue: 13, Pages: 3627-3635
Abstract
There is a growing interest in the potential of bee venom in cosmetics as a rejuvenating agent Products currently on the market do not specify exactly their content of bee venom BV Therefore we developed a method for the detection and quantification of melittin as a marker of bee venom content in selected commercial creams which contained BV according to their marketing claims in order to gauge the relative quality of such formulations A quantitative method was achieved following a rigorous extraction procedure involving sonication liquidliquid extraction and solid phase extraction since carryover of excipients was found to cause a rapid deterioration in the chromatographic performance The method employed a standard additions approach using as spiking standard purified melittin isolated from bee venom and standardised by quantitative NMR The aqueous extracts of the spiked creams were analysed by reversed phase LCMS on an LTQ Orbitrap mass spectrometer The purity of the melittin spiking standard was determined to be 960 The lowest measured mean melittin content in the creams was 319 ppm ±158 ppm 95 CI while the highest was 3721 ppm ±201 ppm 95 CI The method showed adequate linearity R 2 ≥ 098 and a recovery of 877–1022 from a spiked blank cream An assay precision of 20 RSD was achieved for all but one sample where the RSD value was 275 The method was sensitive enough for use in routine assay of BVcontaining cosmetic creams Differences in the melittin content of the commercial products assayed were nearly tenfold
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