The widespread use of gutter oils attracts great concern in recent years. The conventional approach in testing edible oils is laborious and time-consuming. In this light, Dr Yao Zhong-ping of the Food Safety and Technology Research Centre at the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology has developed a new approach for rapid authentication of edible oils and screening of gutter oils within minutes.
Adopting matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) technology, this new method helps establish a preliminary spectral database of common labeled edible oils through simple operations, including direct sample induction, automatic data acquisition and data processing. As different types of edible oils have different MALDI-MS spectral patterns, a sample of edible oil can be authenticated within minutes after arithmetic calculations and comparison with the respective spectrum of that labeled oils in the database.
Study findings have been published in Analytica Chimica Acta, a leading journal in Analytical Chemistry.
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