Discrimination of soybean oil and olive oil by benchtop linear MALDI-TOF

The safety of edible oil has always been a concerned issue by the public. Various methods have been developed for analysis of edible oil, such as PCR, low field nuclear magnetic resonance, ion mobility spectrometry, chromatography, MALDI-TOF-MS. Among these methods, MALDI-TOF-MS has prominent advantages for its convenient operation, high throughput and high sensitivity. As reported by Ng et al (Food chemistry, 2018), a comprehensive spectral database for analysis of edible oils was established using MALDI-MS. Edible oils were analyzed using large MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometer with high specifications in reflection mode, which is difficult to popularize due to their size and initial/running costs. In this study, we attempt to analyze edible oil using a novel benchtop linear MALDI-TOF.
The result showed that soybean oil and olive oil were distinguished successfully, which indicates that benchtop linear MALDI-TOF can be used for edible oil analysis.