A simple phosphorus determination in walnuts and assessment of the assimilable fraction.

In this work, a method for the determination of phosphorus in walnuts has been developed due to the fact that there is no specific method for this purpose. A closed-vessel microwave-assisted digestion of the samples was optimized and a modified molybdenum blue spectrophotometric method was carried out with excellent precision and selectivity. To differentiate assimilable and non-assimilable phosphorus, an easy extraction procedure using 1 M NHCl was used.