The Application Of LC-MS In Food Safety Analysis

Food is fundamental substance which provides with eating and drinking for human being. With development of society and appearance of food diversification, food safety problem gets serious and complex more and more, so food security has been taken close attention by lots of people national and international.At present due to limit of resolution and sensitivity of the instrument, separation and detection of analogs of similar properties, compounds of trace amount and multicomponents in food are main difficulties of food analysis. Because of Liquid Chromatography's high resolution and Mass Spectrometry's high sensitivity, LC-MS becomes the most important method in food analysis. Aiming at the difficulties of food safety analysis, three aspects of food safety analysis based on LC-MS technology are developed as following:(1) A HPLC-MS method for determination of 19 free amino acids in walnut oil is established and 11 amino acids are detected in total. The Arginine and Serine with the higest content in walnut oil are 1.6μg/mL and 1.1μg/mL, respectively. The method without derivatization is simple and rapid, and can be used for fast and high-throughput analysis of amino acids.(2) A HPLC-MS method for testing tetrodotoxin and their analogs in puffer fish extract is established. All TTX analogs are quantified by using the method of main component self-compare without calibration factor, which just need principal component TTX standard without other analogs standards. The results show that four TTX analogs are detected and total content is 7.46%. The method is simple, rapid, accurate and reliable, and can provide a new method for fast analyzing and detecting of TTX and its analogs.(3) A metabolomic study based on UPLC-MS for research mechanism of TTX poisoning is developed. SK-N-SH cells are used for study and divided into high concentration TTX processing group and control group. Principal component analysis (PCA) method is used to find poisoning-related potential biomarkers, and markers are identified through the fragment mass spectrometry and the metabolomics database matching. We can explain the mechanism of TTX poisoning in small molecular level. This method can provide reference for the safety evaluation of TTX.