Reliable determination of tropane alkaloids in cereal based baby foods coupling on-line spe to mass spectrometry avoiding chromatographic step

Cereal based foods are a major part of the infant diet and they can be contaminated with Solanaceae and other plants containing tropane alkaloids. This study was focused on the optimisation of an extraction procedure based on a solid-liquid method and an online SPE system, directly coupled to different mass spectrometry analysers as Orbitrap and triple quadrupole (QqQ), removing the chromatographic separation step. Total running analysis time was 15.8 min (17.3 min in the QqQ system). The developed method was validated obtaining recoveries ranging from 66 to 98% and 68-97% for the Orbitrap and QqQ respectively (RSD lower than 14.3%) and limits of quantification from 0.5 to 5 µg kg-1 and 0.5-10 µg kg-1 for the QqQ and Orbitrap analyser respectively. The validated method was applied to several cereal based baby food samples, finding a positive sample containing atropine (11.5 µg kg-1), scopolamine (2.8 µg kg-1) and apoatropine (7.5 µg kg-1).