Abstract:

Two impurities in the natural vitamin E extracted from oil deodorizer distillate were separated and characterized by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FTICR-MS). The impurities were purified and collected by normal-phase HPLC. The accurate masses were determined using FTICR-MS and fragmentation behavior was studied by GC-MS. The results showed that the impurities had identical MS spectra and similar electron impact (EI) fragmentation patterns. Based on the spectra, the structures of the two impurities were proposed as the enantiomers of sesamin. The presented method is rapid and effective, and can be applied for the food safety to the vitamin E manufacturing industry.

Key words: gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), high resolution mass spectrometry, impurity, structure identification, vitamin E