A gas chromatography system is composed of four major components: carrier gas source, sample introduction system, column, and detector. Basic Principle of gas chromatography – sample vaporized by injection into a heated system, eluted through a column by inert gaseous mobile phase and detected.
It is widely used in food analysis. Typical applications pertain to the quantitative and/or qualitative analysis of food composition, trace analysis, determination of volatiles, and identification of sources of adulteration such as pesticides, fumigants, environmental pollutants, natural toxins, veterinary drugs and undesired flavours.
The aroma of most food products is a complicated mixture, sometimes consisting of several hundred compounds.
Gas chromatography offers excellent separation efficiency that serves advanced characterisation of volatiles and semi-volatiles in food samples.
The major advantages of modern gas chromatography reside in the high resolution, the speed, the sensitivity, the precision, and the accuracy that characterizes it.
Gas chromatography in food application
