METHOD DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBONS (PAHS) RESIDUE IN COCOA AND COCOA PRODUCTS
Authors: Badrul H. Z., Salsazali S.
Journal Issue: Malaysian Cocoa Journal, Volume 13(1)/2021
Keywords: cocoa beans, cocoa powder, GC-MS/MS, PAHs, Theobroma cacao
Published On: 1/11/2021
Abstract
A quick and simple extraction method was developed and validated for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon residues in cocoa beans and cocoa powder using acetonitrile extraction and GC-MS/MS detection for benz[a]anthracene, chrysene, benzo[a]pyrene, and benzo[b]fluoranthene. Different extraction parameters such as extraction volume, extraction time and clean-up adsorbents were studied for their extraction efficiency and repeatability, assessed by recovery and relative standard deviation, respectively. The final optimized method was acetonitrile extraction with 20 mL extraction volume with 10 minutes extraction time. In this study, we found that the results for clean-up using primary secondary amine (PSA) adsorbent gave poor extraction efficiency. Hence clean-up step using only magnesium sulphate was used in the final method. The recoveries for cocoa beans samples spiked at 10 and 50 ng/g were in the ranged from 70-120 % for cocoa beans and cocoa powder with RSDs below 20 %.