Synthesis, Characterization, and Fabrication of a Salicylaldazine-Modified GC Electrode to Detect Tryptophan in Food Samples: An Analytical Technique Using an Electrochemical Approach

The current investigation attempts to devise a simple and clean method to synthesize salicylaldazine (SA) using a green approach. The prepared compound was characterized using UV-vis, LC-MS, and SEM techniques. The SA was applied to a glassy carbon electrode (GCE) to obtain modified SA-GCE and used to detect the tryptophan levels in food products such as milk, egg, and chicken as samples. The fabricated electrode demonstrated excellent stability in addition to reproducibility and repeatability of the data performed using voltammetric techniques, viz., cyclic and differential pulse voltammetry. The contributions of various constraints that include concentration effects, pH, in addition to the scan rate have been determined. The detection limit for SA-GCE was 0.065 μM with a linear range from 2.5 to 39.7 μM. All the analyzed food samples (egg, milk, and chicken extract) showed excellent recovery (>96%) with RSD 3.6%. The results suggest that the modified SA-GCE can serve as an electrochemical sensor and an excellent method for the quantitative estimation of tryptophan levels in samples, useful for food-based industries.