Abstract
alpha-Difluoromethylornithine is an effective medication for the treatment of African Trypanosomiasis and widely distributed for the treatment of hirsutism. This work provides an adequate analytical protocol for the spectrophotometric and the spectrofluorimetric determination of alpha-difluoromethylornithine through its interaction with 4-chloro-7-nitrobenzofurazan (NBD-chloride) reagent. After optimization of the reaction conditions (NBD-chloride volume, buffer volume, the best diluting solvent, heating time and temperature and pH of the medium) the reaction product was measured spectrophotometrically at lambda(max) = 478 nm and spectrofluorimetrically at lambda(emission) = 540 nm after lambda(excitation) = 475 nm. The proposed methods were linear over the ranges 5-30 mu g ml(-1) and 0.4-2 mu g ml(-1) for the spectrophotometric method and the spectrofluorimetric method, respectively. Moreover, the proposed work offers an adequate sensitive and selective determination for alpha-difluoromethylornithine where the detection limits were 0.90 mu g ml(-1) and 0.071 mu g ml(-1) for the spectrophotometric method and the spectrofluorimetric method, respectively. Furthermore, both methods were successfully applied for the quantification of alpha-difluoromethylornithine in the pharmaceutical cream samples with acceptable recovery results.