Measuring the concentration and distribution of volatiles in foods and other agricultural products is of considerable interest to food scientists and members of related fields due to their role in aroma and chemical communication. However, strategies for performing high-throughput measurements of trace-level volatiles, or for generating images of the distribution of volatiles within a sample, has lagged behind many other physiochemical traits (e.g. major metabolites, color, texture). We have recently proposed to use novel sorbent meshes (SPMESH) to extract trace volatiles from complex matrices while preserving the spatial distribution of the original sample. SPMESH can then be coupled to ambient ionization – mass spectrometry, e.g. Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART)-MS, avoiding the use of slow gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses. Using SPMESH-DART coupled to a high resolution mass spectrometer (Orbitrap Elite) we can achieve detection limits from 2 ng/L to 3 µg/L for four common volatiles in grape samples with an analysis time of &lt;30 seconds per sample. We also show that SPMESH materials can be used with micro-titer plates to achieve rapid, parallel extraction of volatiles, which can then be efficiently analyzed by DART-MS using an automated positioning stage

Rapid, sensitive, and spatially resolved measurements of trace volatiles using sorbent meshes and high-resolution ambient ionization mass spectrometry

254th National Meeting (2017)

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