Comprehensive Strategies for Polychlorinated biphenyls Quantitative Analysis Specialized in Foodstuffs

Abstract

Food matrices are naturally complex and many ingredients such as lipids, proteins, pigments, and others are co-extracted with PCBs. So, reliable and effective analytical techniques are needed to determine PCBs in foodstuffs at low concentrations. This review is exploring and summarizes the current available techniques for extraction, clean-up, and separation techniques to quantify the PCBs in different foods. Several extraction approaches have been improved to overcome the issues associated with regular techniques involves a large amount of solvent and time consuming. Accelerated solvent extraction is a promising and effective extraction technique using a reasonable amount of solvents. Acidified silica gel alone or in combination with alumina is succeeded to purify most extract matrices. Besides, gel permission chromatography is widely used to eliminate large size molecules and other co-extracted impurities. As a reference technique, GC-HRMS is the most effective technique for quantification of dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs. As alternative techniques, GC coupling with tandem MS is optimized to analyze dioxin and PCBs in foodstuffs and represent a cost effectiveness technique compared to GC-HRMS. GCxGC-HRTOF-MS is evaluated and validated to examine dl-PCBs and indicator PCBs and the obtained results were satisfactory well equivalent to those results obtained by GC-HRMS.