Volatiles Analysis of Honey by Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) : Comparison of SPME Volatiles Extraction Methods

Abstract

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are the fingerprint of a specific honey and could be used to differentiate honey from different botanical and geographic floral origins. This work was conducted to compare different methods SPME volatile extraction from honey samples of acacia, chestnut, and jujube originated from South Korea. The volatile compositions were analyzed based on dynamic headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) using divinylbenzene-carboxen polydimethylsiloxane (DVB/CAR/PDMS) fiber followed by thermal desorption gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GC-MS). Chestnut honey yielded most diverse volatiles and acacia least. Two methods resulted in distinctively differences in the chemical composition of major volatiles and semivolatiles components when extracted with and without addition of NaCl showed Jaccard similarities of 0.1~0.2 on three different honey samples. Additionally, volatile profiles were highly separated by the extraction methods used. We found volatile organic compounds (VOCs) analysis of honey without salt addition as a preferred faster method and 2~4g neat sampling would yield consistent volatile profiles from SPME. Such studies of identification of VOCs along with floral origins are important and contribute in the efforts to standardize honey quality and avoid fraudulent labeling of the product.