Investigation of food flavours by multidimensional and comprehensive gas chromatography

Abstract

Multidimensional gas chromatography (MDGC) has pushed the development of flavour analysis for more than three decades in mainly three fields: enantioselective separation of enantiomers in the second dimension to assess authenticity of flavouring materials and to elucidate the structure-activity relation of stereoisomers; the identification and quantitation of trace volatile compounds by separating co-eluting abundant volatiles and third, sniffing the effluent of the second dimension for odourant discovery. While in the last decade the focus in flavour analysis was directed to the investigation of non-volatile taste active components, MDGC is primarily used for routine applications nowadays. At the same time, comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC × GC) was established in Flavour and Fragrance laboratories as complementary multi-dimensional tool to characterize complex flavouring materials. Apart of these multidimensional techniques, one-dimensional gas chromatography is still the workhorse and efficiently copes with analytical questions typical for the flavour and fragrances industry. This chapter will review the current use of multidimensional gas chromatographic techniques in the flavour industry and will give dedicated examples.