Comparison of the triglyceride composition of vegetable samples with ultra-high efficiency / low-pressure supercritical fluid chromatography – mass spectrometry

The triglycerides composition and their respective abundance in 34 vegetable lipidic samples from 25 different natural products, most of which were edible lipid samples, were examined using ultra-high efficiency / low-pressure supercritical fluid chromatography with 5 tandem columns filled with core-shell particles, hyphenated to mass spectrometry with atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (UHE/LPSFC-APCI-MS). Thanks to the high efficiency and high selectivity of this chromatographic method joint to the sensitivity of mass spectrometry, 94 different triglycerides were identified and quantified, comprising low-abundance triglycerides, but also structurally close ones, as regio-isomers and geometrical (cis/trans) isomers. Relative quantification results enabled to construct hierarchical cluster analyses to compare the level of similarity between samples. Thanks to that, samples from identical or different vegetable sources were compared. Oils from the same source were compared based on the possible refining treatment they had received, allowing to examine the impact of the treatment on the triglyceride content. Then, the quantification results were compared to data previously obtained with the same separation method but with UV or evaporative light-scattering detection with a smaller set of samples.