Chromatography Techniques

Chromatography in Food Science Technology

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With modern technology and facilities, our food supply is more diverse and more highly processed than ever before. To ensure the safety and nutritional quality of our food many countries and organization have promulgated regulations that stipulate acceptable levels for individual chemical additives, residues and contaminants in food products. Other regulations require food packaging to list ingredients relating to nutritional content, such as preservative, artificial chemicals, unsaturated and saturated fat. Food manufacturers and processors themselves must be able to assess product quality. Meeting all of these requirements is the function of food analysis.

Increasingly, food analysis methods are built around high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), which has proven to be an optimal technology for detecting and/or quantifying the vast majority of food analytes. These methods employ a stepwise approach while separating and analysis the sample, it first removes the sample matrix, then isolates the analytes of interest and individually resolves them on a chromatographic column. The efficiency of the separation depends on, among other things, the differential interaction of analytes of interest with both mobile and column stationary phases during the separation. It is important to classify food analytes according to their relative volatility and polarity are factors that must be considered when selecting an appropriate analytical method for their determination.

Gas chromatography (GC) is widely used in applications involving food analysis. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and to mention state-of-the-art GC techniques used in the major applications pertaining to the quantitative and/or qualitative analysis of food composition, natural products, food additives, flavour and aroma components, a variety of transformation products, and contaminants, such as environmental pollutants, pesticides, fumigants, natural toxins, veterinary drugs, and packaging materials. Among the several new qualitative and quantitative techniques being developed in food analysis applications, fast-GC/mass spectrometry (MS) will have the most impact in the next decade. Three approaches to fast-GC/MS include low-pressure GC/MS, GC/time-of-flight (TOF)-MS and GC/supersonic molecular beam (SMB)-MS.