Core shell stationary phases for a novel separation of triglycerides in plant oils by high performance liquid chromatography with electrospray-quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometer

• We describe a new chromatographic method for qualitative and quantitative analysis of triglycerides mixtures.
• We developed and validated a new method using a Poroshell 120 EC-C18 column.
• We used for the first time a core–shell column coupled with an ESI-Q-ToF mass spectrometer system.
• Reproducible and resolved chromatograms for more than 40 TAGs were acquired in 25 min.
• The new method was applied to a set of 10 reference plant oils.

A new method for the analysis of triglycerides (TAGs) in vegetable oils was developed using a Poroshell 120 EC-C18 column (3.0 mm × 50 mm, 2.7 μm) with a high resolution ESI-Q-ToF tandem mass spectrometer as detection system. We used an Agilent Poroshell column, which is characterized by a recently developed stationary phase based on non-porous core particles. The results highlighted the advantages of this column in terms of the dramatic improvement in the number of theoretical plates and in low column backpressure. The developed method enabled us to analyze complex mixtures of more than 40 TAGs within less than 25 min and with a low backpressure (lower than 100 bar), and represents the first application of a core-shell stationary phase in reverse phase HPLC using an ESI-Q-ToF as detection system. The method was optimized on standards of TAGs, validated and applied to several plant oils. By a quantitative point of view, the method showed a very good linearity (r2 > 0.999) in the range 0.1–2.4 μg/g; high intra- and inter-day precision both in terms of retention times (RSD% < 0.04%) and peak areas (RSD% < 0.3%). Limits of detection and quantitation were lower than 0.03 μg/g and 0.10 μg/g, respectively.