Comprehensive Multidimensional Gas Chromatography Coupled With Dual Detection For MOSH&MOAH Determination In Food

The presence of mineral oil hydrocarbons (MOH) in food has been known since 1989, when Biedermann and coworkers (1989) reported its presence accidentally in irradiate hazelnuts. However, such a contamination problem was only brought at the attention of the public opinion 20 years later when the same authors related the presence of the high amount of MOH find in dry food to the use of recycled fibers for food contact material (Biedermann et al., 2009). The analysis of such a contaminant in food is a challenging task, mainly due to the high complexity of
the matrices and the high affinity with the lipid fraction and many of its components. Due to this challenge, the use of powerful confirmatory techniques is required. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA, 2012) proposed the use of on-line LC-GC/FID as the most effective method for the routine analysis of MOH, but the presence of false positive and the doubts on the nature of the chromatographic hump originated with this analysis remain, due also to the lack of a proper confirmatory method. Most recently, in February 2019, the European Joint Research Center
(JRC, 2019) published the Guideline reporting the minimal requirements of the method to be used to investigate MOH contamination in food and extending the range of volatility considered up to C50. The goal of the present study is to optimize a GC×GC-MS/FID for the simultaneous quantification and confirmation of the results. A careful optimization is necessary to proper elute up to C50 without losing the inherent advantage of structured chromatograms obtained when using GC×GC.