Resolution of phenolic antioxidant mixtures employing a voltammetric bio-electronic tongue

This work reports the application of a Bio-Electronic Tongue (BioET) system made from an array of enzymatic biosensors in the analysis of polyphenols, focusing on major polyphenols found in wine. For this, the biosensor array was formed by a set of epoxy-graphite biosensors, bulk-modified with different redox enzymes (tyrosinase and laccase) and copper nanoparticles, aimed at the simultaneous determination of the different polyphenols. Departure information was the set of voltammograms generated with the biosensor array, selecting some characteristic features in order to reduce the data for the Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Finally, after the ANN model optimization, it was used for the resolution and quantification of each compound. Catechol, caffeic acid and catechin formed the three-analyte case study resolved in this work. Good prediction ability was attained, therefore allowing the separate quantification of the three phenols with predicted vs. expected slope better than 0.970 for the external test set (n = 10). Finally, BioET has been also tested with spiked wine samples with good recovery yields (values of 104%, 117% and 122% for catechol, caffeic acid and catechin, respectively). © 2012 The Royal Society of Chemistry.