Flow‐injection chemiluminescence determination of melamine in urine and plasma

ABSTRACTA novel flow‐injection chemiluminescence method for the determination of melamine in urine and plasma was developed. It was found that melamine can remarkably enhance chemiluminescence emission from the luminol–K3Fe(CN)6 system in an alkaline medium. Under the optimum conditions, chemiluminescence intensity had a good linear relationship with the concentration of melamine in the range 9.0 × 10–9–7.0 × 10–6 g/mL, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9992. The detection limit (3σ) was 3.5 ng/mL. The method has been applied to determine the concentration of melamine in samples using liquid–liquid extraction. Average recoveries of melamine were 102.6% in urine samples and 95.1% in plasma samples. The method provided a reproducible and stable approach for the sensitive detection of melamine in urine and plasma samples. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.