Abstract

Nicotine is one of the highly toxic and addictive chemicals, belonging to tobacco alkaloids. In the present work, a HPTLC method was developed for the estimation of nicotine in different brands of Gutkha available in local market. Diethyl ether extracts of standard nicotine and the sample solutions were spotted on pre-coated TLC Silica gel G60 F254 plated and developed using chioroform: methanol: ammonia (60:5:1 v/v) as mobile phase. Densitometric scanning was performed at 255 nm. The linearity was found to be in the concentration range of 200-1000 ng/spot with correlation coefficient of 0.996.The method was validated for precision, repeatability and accuracy. Twenty different brands of Gutkha were analysed for the nicotine content and the results were compared with the nicotine content estimated by an UV-Spectrophotometric method. The content of nicotine in different brands of Gutkha was found to be in the range of 0.1 to 0.5% w/w.