The phospholipid chromatographic fingerprint: An analytical cutting-edge strategy in the distinguished characterization of olive oil

In this study, two basics are addressed to achieve the characterization of edible vegetable oils from a universal perspective. Firstly, the use of a very specific chemical fraction scarcely studied, such as the phospholipids, is proposed to tackle vegetable oil characterization. For this, a new analytical method for phospholipid fraction is developed, which is based on reverse phase liquid chromatography coupled to universal detector such as charged aerosol detector (LC-CAD). In addition, a additional method using LC-(Q-Orbitrap)MS has been developed for the chemical identification of the compounds present in the phospholipid fraction. Secondly, it is proved that the instrument-agnostizing methodology is suitable to obtain a unique and time-consistent chromatographic fingerprint for each vegetable oil, which is independent of the instrument used. This could lead for the setting up of universal databases and the development of a single global multivariate model enabling edible vegetable oils discrimination by any laboratory at any time. This ultimately leads to resource and time reduction, generating lower analysis costs. The main results have been to be able to unequivocally characterise the different edible vegetable oils under study using data mining/machine learning methods such as partial least squaresdiscriminant analysis, support vector machine and classification a regression trees. In addition, more than 60 chemical compounds have been characterised in samples of olive oil of different categories and other edible vegetable oils respectively. This resulted in the proposal of tentative chemical markers which could be used to identify a particular edible vegetable oil.