Rapid estimation of piperine in black pepper: Exploration of Raman spectroscopy

The major chemical marker of black pepper (Piper nigrum L) is piperine and its estimation is extremely important for quality assessment of black pepper. The methods for piperine quantification, to date, are laboratory based and use high end instruments like chromatographs, which require tedious sample processing and cause sample destruction.

In this article, we present a simple, rapid and green analytical method based on Raman spectroscopy for the quantitative assessment of piperine.

To assess the potential of the technique, we report the complete vibrational characterisation of the piperine with density functional theory (DFT) calculations.

The theoretical peaks were obtained at 1097 cm^-1 , 1388 cm^-1 , 1528 cm^-1 , 1578 cm^-1 , and at 1627 cm^-1 , and this result was verified in a Raman spectrometer followed by a preliminary experiment. Twenty black pepper samples were analysed using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and used as reference data for Raman analysis. The Raman shift spectra were analysed using partial least squares (PLS) and good prediction accuracy with correlation coefficient of prediction (Rp² ) = 0.93, root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) = 0.13 and residual prediction deviation (RPD) = 3.9 obtained.

The results demonstrate the efficacy of the Raman technique for the estimation of piperine in the dry fruit of Piper nigrum.