Determination of heavy polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons of concern in edible oils via excitation-emission fluorescence spectroscopy on nylon membranes coupled to unfolded partial least-squares/residual bilinearization

Seven heavy polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) of concern on the US Environmental Protection Agency priority pollutant list (benzo[a]anthracene, benzo[b]fluoranthene, benzo[k]fluoranthene, benzo[a]pyrene, dibenz[a,h]anthracene, benzo[g,h,i]perylene, and indeno[1,2,3-c,d]-pyrene) were simultaneously analyzed in extra virgin olive oil. The analysis is based on the measurement of excitation-emission matrices on nylon membrane and processing of data using unfolded partial least-squares regression with residual bilinearization (U-PLS/RBL). The conditions needed to retain the PAHs present in the oil matrix on the nylon membrane were evaluated. The limit of detection for the proposed method ranged from 0.29 to 1.0 mu g kg(-1), with recoveries between 64 and 78 %. The predicted U-PLS/RBL concentrations compared favorably with those measured using high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection. The proposed method was applied to ten samples of edible oil, two of which presented PAHs ranging from 0.35 to 0.63 mu g kg(-1). The principal advantages of the proposed analytical method are that it provides a significant reduction in time and solvent consumption with a similar limit of detection as compared with chromatography.