Spectrophotometric determination of selenium in Spirulina algae using Diaminotoluene reagent

Due to the progress of science and technology in health and medicine, selenium is mentioned as an excellent antioxidant in preventing the growth of cancers cell and even helping the process of cell growth. In most countries, plant foods are the main source of selenium. Among these plant sources, a kind of green-blue algae from the species of cyanobacteria should be mentioned, which is introduced as Spirulina algae. In addition to providing the body with the selenium it needs, spirulina is an excellent source of essential proteins, minerals, vitamins and amino acids. However, the amount of selenium required by the body and the fact that its excessive increase causes toxicity doubles the need to pay attention to its accurate quantitative measurement. These measurements are usually performed with costly and long-term methods such as ICP-AES. Therefore, in this study, the suitable specific ligand (Diaminotoluene) for selenium was used with low cost and high availability, using simple, low cost and fast technique as UV-spectrophotometric method.The results of the analytical method validation indicated that this ligand has high productivity and also this method should be quite suitable for replacement with high cost methods such as ICP-AES. In addition, this method used can provide all the parameters required to analytical method validation.