Determination of molecular weight of hyaluronic acid by near-infrared spectroscopy

This paper attempted the feasibility to determine the molecular weight of hyaluronic acid with near-infrared (NIR) diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. In this work, 46 experimental samples of hyaluronic acid powder were analyzed by partial least square (PLS) regression multivariate calibration method in the selected region of NIR spectra. The leave-one-out cross-validation method was used for the PLS model selection criterion. The accuracy of the final model was evaluated according to correlation coefficient of prediction set (Rp) and root mean square error of prediction set (RMSEP). The repeatability was verified through repeated measurement of spectra coupled with an appropriate chi-square test. Finally, the optimal calibration model was obtained with Rp = 0.9814 and RMSEP = 88.32 when using Savitzky-Golay first (SG-1st) derivative with 9 smoothing points spectral preprocessing method. The parameters above and repeatability of NIR spectroscopy obtained from chi-square test were both within the range of permissible error in factories. This study demonstrated that NIR spectroscopy was superior to conventional methods for the fast determination of molecular weight of hyaluronic acid.