Quantification of extra virgin olive oil in dressing and edible oil blends using the representative TMS-4,4'-desmethylsterols gas-chromatographic-normalized fingerprint

This paper describes and discusses the application of trimethylsilyl (TMS)-4,4'-desmethylsterols derivatives chromatographic fingerprints (obtained from an off-line HPLC-GC-FID system) for the quantification of extra virgin olive oil in commercial vinaigrettes, dressing salad and in-house reference materials (i-HRM) using two different Partial Least Square-Regression (PLS-R) multivariate quantification methods. Different data pre-processing strategies were carried out being the whole one: (i) internal normalization; (ii) sampling based on The Nyquist Theorem; (iii) internal correlation optimized shifting, icoshift; (iv) baseline correction (v) mean centering and (vi) selecting zones. The first model corresponds to a matrix of dimensions 'n×911' variables and the second one to a matrix of dimensions 'n×431' variables. It has to be highlighted that the proposed two PLS-R models allow the quantification of extra virgin olive oil in binary blends, foodstuffs, etc., when the provided percentage is greater than 25%.