Quality assessment of olive oil based on volatile compound fingerprinting using HRGC-IMS analysis

摘要

The evaluation of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) with respect to quality and authenticity has been in the focus of a plethora of studies in the past years and still poses a challenge for researches. In particular, sensitive, rapid and low-cost analytical methods are highly relevant for enforcement purposes to ensure EVOO authenticity. Nontargeted headspace analysis of volatile organic compounds ( VOCs) by high resolution gas chromatography (HRGC), coupled to ion mobility spectrom- etry (IMS) provides an fast and effective approach for the discrimination of EVOOs of different geographical origins. This is especially due to minimal sample preparation and short run times, paired with the orthogonal separation power of retention time vs. drift time in GC-IMS. The resulting product-characteristic three-dimensional fingerprints can be evaluated by multivariate statistics tools implemented in custom MATLAB routines.