Pyrolytic profiling nitrosamine specific chemiluminescence detection combined with multivariate chemometric discrimination for non-targeted detection and classification of nitroso compounds in complex samples

Abstract

The problems of contamination of many products by nitroso compounds have been discussed since 1970′s and have been partially solved, namely, the contamination by carcinogenic volatile N-nitrosamines. However, there is still a gap in knowing non-volatile nitroso compounds in terms of both the determination of these compounds and the description of their toxicity. Therefore, a procedure for their detailed non-targeted study is necessary to be developed. Based on these facts, a new method permitting the detection and the classification of nitroso compound groups, such as N-nitroso, C-nitroso, and interfering substances in the nitrosamine specific chemiluminescence detection after previous gas chromatographic separation, was developed. The method is based on signal profiling of chromatographic peaks recorded by a chemiluminescence detector at different pyrolytic temperatures and subsequent multivariate chemometric classification. The resulting classification function by linear discriminant analysis shows good performance with total accuracy of 96.12% after the method validation. The method was successfully applied and demonstrated on a non-targeted beer sample analysis. Nitroso compounds detected by the method were selected for detailed structural analysis by GC-MS/MS. The combination of the presented method with the MS/MS instrumentation provides a really powerful analytical tool for the identification of unknown nitroso compounds in complex samples. This study represents a valuable contribution to the protocols of identification of organic compounds with the nitrogen functional groups – toxicologically and analytically important nitroso compounds.