Hyphenation of quadrupole MS to GC and comprehensive two-dimensional GC for the analysis of suspected allergens: Review and improvement

This survey reviews papers that have been previously published on the quantitative analysis of suspected allergens. The routine gas chromatography (GC)-mass spectrometry (MS) method allows their evaluation in most fragrances, but the application of an automated data treatment sometimes leads to over- or underestimations when target compounds are coeluted or shifted because of the presence of other fragrance ingredients. In such cases, an appropriate retreatment of data generated by the routine analysis is proposed to better estimate these shifted or coeluted peaks. A second and more sophisticated approach, based on comprehensive bidimensional GC hyphenated to quadrupole MS, overcomes coelution problems. However, its use is still time consuming because of the lack of a commercial program. In this work, a software prototype is tested to reprocess the data. It dramatically shortens the data treatment and offers good quantitative results.