Nontargeted screening of chemical contaminants and illegal additives in food based on liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry

Nowadays food safety has become one of the focus topics all over the world. Illegal addition of additives and chemical contaminants are the prominent problems. Because of the advantages of high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS), the combination of liquid chromatography (LC) with HRMS has been more and more used in food safety analysis, but most of related analytical methods have been developed to detect the specific known compounds. For unknown harmful compounds in food, nontargeted screening method is a complementary one. However, there are still a lot of challenges in the nontargeted analysis. Here, the recent studies about sample preparation, LC-HRMS profiling analysis, data pretreatment, differential analysis, identification of unknown compounds in nontargeted screening of chemical contaminants and illegal additives in food are reviewed based on the papers published mainly in 2010-2017, which can be helpful for defining potential risk compounds in food analysis in the future.