Reliable determination of tropane alkaloids in cereal based baby foods coupling on-line spe to mass spectrometry avoiding chromatographic step

Jesús Marín-Sáez; Roberto Romero-González; Antonia Garrido Frenich

doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2018.09.137

Reliable determination of tropane alkaloids in cereal based baby foods coupling on-line spe to mass spectrometry avoiding chromatographic step

Food Chem. 2019 Mar 1:275:746-753. doi: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2018.09.137. Epub 2018 Sep 24.

Authors

Jesús Marín-Sáez¹, Roberto Romero-González¹, Antonia Garrido Frenich²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Physics, Analytical Chemistry Area, University of Almería, Research Centre for Agricultural and Food Biotechnology (BITAL), Agrifood Campus of International Excellence ceiA3, Carretera de Sacramento s/n, E-04120 Almería, Spain.
² Department of Chemistry and Physics, Analytical Chemistry Area, University of Almería, Research Centre for Agricultural and Food Biotechnology (BITAL), Agrifood Campus of International Excellence ceiA3, Carretera de Sacramento s/n, E-04120 Almería, Spain. Electronic address: agarrido@ual.es.

PMID: 30724258
DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2018.09.137

Abstract

Cereal based foods are a major part of the infant diet and they can be contaminated with Solanaceae and other plants containing tropane alkaloids. This study was focused on the optimisation of an extraction procedure based on a solid-liquid method and an online SPE system, directly coupled to different mass spectrometry analysers as Orbitrap and triple quadrupole (QqQ), removing the chromatographic separation step. Total running analysis time was 15.8 min (17.3 min in the QqQ system). The developed method was validated obtaining recoveries ranging from 66 to 98% and 68-97% for the Orbitrap and QqQ respectively (RSD lower than 14.3%) and limits of quantification from 0.5 to 5 µg kg^-1 and 0.5-10 µg kg^-1 for the QqQ and Orbitrap analyser respectively. The validated method was applied to several cereal based baby food samples, finding a positive sample containing atropine (11.5 µg kg^-1), scopolamine (2.8 µg kg^-1) and apoatropine (7.5 µg kg^-1).

Keywords: Baby foods; Cereals; Online SPE; Orbitrap; QqQ; Tropane alkaloids.

MeSH terms

Alkaloids / analysis*
Alkaloids / isolation & purification
Atropine / analysis
Humans
Infant
Infant Food / analysis*
Scopolamine / analysis
Solid Phase Extraction
Spectrometry, Mass, Electrospray Ionization*
Tandem Mass Spectrometry
Tropanes / chemistry*

Substances

Alkaloids
Tropanes
Atropine
Scopolamine