Analytical Sciences


Abstract − Analytical Sciences, 34(8), 887 (2018).

Separation and Analysis of Sucrose Esters in Tobacco by Online Liquid Chromatography–Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry
Zhi HUANG, Yan-Jiu BI, Yun-Fei SHA, Wen-Yan XIE, Da WU, and Bai-Zhan LIU
Technical Center of Shanghai Tobacco Group Co. Ltd., Shanghai 200082, China
In this work, a strategy of in-series combination of ultrasound-assisted extraction and online LC-GC/MS was constructed for effective separation and analysis of sucrose esters in tobacco. Sucrose esters were first extracted by ultrasound-assisted extraction with high efficiency and easyhandling. Online LC-GC/MS was then applied for sucrose ester clean-up and analysis. To better evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy, we limited our focus to five groups of sucrose ester isomers. Each group differed in mass from the next by 14 Da. The obtained coefficient of the calibration curve was 0.9986. Limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantitation (LOQ) were 0.05 and 0.16 μg/ mL, respectively. The recovery was above 90% and the reproducibility was below 4%. This strategy was subsequently applied to the comparison of relative amounts of five groups of sucrose esters extracted from three different parts of aromatic tobacco. The satisfactory performance indicated that this strategy has great prospect for the rapid and high-throughput analysis of sucrose esters in tobacco.