Using UHPLC-HRMS-based comprehensive strategy to efficiently and accurately screen and identify illegal additives in...

Accurately and high-thoroughly screening illegal additives in health-care foods continues to be a challenging task in routine analysis for the ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry based techniques. In this work, we proposed a new strategy to identify additives in complex food matrices, which consists of both experimental design and advanced chemometric data analysis. At first, reliable features in the analyzed samples were screened based on a simple but efficient sample weighting design, and those related to illegal additives were screened with robust statistical analysis. After the MS¹ in-source fragment ion identification, both MS¹ and MS/MS spectra were constructed for each underlying compound, based on which illegal additives can be precisely identified. The performance of the developed strategy was demonstrated by using mixture and synthetic sample datasets, indicating an improvement of data analysis efficiency up to 70.3 %. Finally, the developed strategy was applied for the screening of unknown additives in 21 batches of commercially available health-care foods. Results indicated that at least 80 % of false-positive results can be reduced and 4 additives were screened and confirmed.