A modified methylation method to determine fatty acid content by gas chromatography

Abstract

An improved rapid method for determination of the fatty acid composition using modified methylation procedure was compared with the AOAC reference procedure based on the methylation of fatty acid with the addition of BF3 catalyst before and while heating. The new method is useful for research and routine quality control and has a number of advantages over the reference procedure which are more rapid, simple and also reliable. Applicability of the modified methylation method was confirmed with three vegetable oil samples (palm oil, coconut oil and olive oil). Based on the validation method results, we obtained that a quite linear calibration curve of fatty acids was performed with R2 in range of 0.9972-0.9994. The sensitivity of gas chromatography instrument was able to analyze the fatty acids up to a few ppm, the precision and accuracy were good enough with the %RSD between 1.5%-19.5% and the recovery of linolenic acid was 99.1% in the range of 80.0%-113.3%.