A comparative study of volatile components in green, oolong and black teas by using comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography–time-of-flight mass spectrometry and multivariate data analysis

• A GC × GC–TOFMS method was developed to analyze the volatile components of tea.
• Structured chromatogram-assisted identification was used for qualitative analysis.
• 450 volatile compounds in tea were tentatively identified.
• Multivariate analysis was applied to find the differential compounds in different teas.
• 74 compounds were defined to interpret the differences in green, oolong and black teas.

The difference of volatile components in green, oolong and black teas was studied by using comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography–time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC–TOFMS). Simultaneous distillation extraction was proved to be a suitable technique to extract the analytes with interest. A total of 450 compounds were tentatively identified with comparison to the standard mass spectra in available databases, retention index on the first dimension and structured chromatogram. 33 tea samples, including 12, 12 and 9 samples of green, oolong and black tea were analyzed by using GC × GC–TOFMS. After peak alignment, around 3600 peaks were detected. Partial least squares – discriminant analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to classify these samples, then non-parametric hypothesis test (Mann–Whitney U test) and the variable importance in the projection (VIP) were applied to discover the key components to distinguish the three types of tea with significant difference amongst them. 74 differential compounds are defined to interpret the chemical differences of 3 types of tea. This study shows the power of GC × GC–TOFMS method combined with multivariate data analysis to investigate natural products with high complexity for information extraction.