Radioisotope dilution technique for determination of vitamin B12 in foods

A radioisotope dilution (RID) method for the determination of vitamin B12 is presented. The method combines a standard extraction procedure (AOAC 43.108, 12th ed.) with a commercially available RID assay kit. The method was evaluated on a wide range of fortified and unfortified food products. Recovery studies on both groups yielded average recoveries of 98.1 and 95.8%, respectively. Reproducibility data generated from replicate analyses on both groups gave a relative standard deviation of 6.9% for the fortified group and 9.2% for the unfortified group. For the samples studied, the mean vitamin B12 content determined by the RID method was 8.01 micrograms/100 g vs a mean of 7.54 micrograms/100 g by the AOAC microbiological method; the correlation coefficient was r = 0.983.