Modified colorimetric method for determining indole in shrimp

A modified spectrophotometric method for measuring indole in shrimp is described. The method was developed to eliminate the time-consuming steam distillation and expensive instrumentation required by the official AOAC methods. Indole is extracted with light petroleum from trichloroacetic acid-precipitated shrimp muscle. The extracted indole, soluble in light petroleum, is reacted and re-extracted with Ehrlich's reagent; indole in the form of a rose indole complex can be determined spectrophotometrically. When shrimp at various degrees of decomposition were analyzed for indole by the modified method as well as by the official AOAC colorimetric method, the correlation coefficient between the data from the 2 methods was 0.98.