Abstract: In this study,the content of water-soluble vitamins in juice of 7 different lemon varieties were simultaneously determined using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).The chromatographic separation was carried out on a ZORABX SB-C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm I.D.,5 μm) using 0.1% phosphoric acid aqueous solution-acetonitrile as mobile phases at a flow rate of 0.9 mL/min kept at 30 °C through gradient elution and detection wavelength was 267 nm.The results indicated that six water-soluble vitamins were thoroughly separated within 17 min.This method exhibited a linear range from 0.06 to 49.60 μg/mL with the correlation coefficients above 0.9999.The limits of detection (LOD,S/N=3) ranged from 0.03 to 0.27 μg/mL,and the limits of quantification (LOQ,S/N=10) ranged from 0.08 to 0.82 μg/mL.The average recovery rates ranged from 99.06% to 101.72% with RSD between 0.49% and 0.98%.The results indicated that vitamin C was the major component in seven lemon varieties,the content of vitamin C was the highest in R_NM juice (57.96±0.56 mg/100 g) and the lowest in EUR_D juice (27.37±0.27 mg/100 g).The similarities and differences of water-soluble vitamins in different lemon juice were revealed by principal component analysis.The comprehensive evaluation index of S_NM was higher than other six samples,and EUR_D was lower than EUR_C and EUR_Y.

Key words: lemon, water-soluble vitamins, high performance liquid chromatography, simultaneous determination, principal component analysis