Simultaneous Screening of 14 Illegal Food Additives in Wines Using Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry

An ultra performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometric (UPLC-ESI-MS/MS) method for the simultaneous screening 14 illegal food additives (acesulfame, sodium saccharin, sodium cyclamate, aspartame, neotame, sucralose, ponceau 2R, ponceau 3R, ponceau SX, sunset yellow FCF, allura red, acid Red 1, acid red 13, erythrosine) in wines has been developed. The HPLC separation was carried out using an UPLC BEH C-18(100 mm X 2.1 mm X 1.7 mu m) as solid phase. Several parameters, including the compositions and ion strength of the mobile phase, and the monitor ions were optimized for improving the chromatographic performance and the sensitivity. The results demonstrated that the sensitivity could be significantly influenced by the amine concentration in the eluent. The separation could be completed in less than 6 min when using 1 mmol/L ammonium formate-formic acid buffer (pH 3.9) and acetonitrile as the mobile phases, gradient elution. The column temperature was kept at 35 degrees C. When the analytes were detected by ESI--MS under selected ion monitoring mode, the detection limits were 0.01-1.0 mu g/L except sucralose, sunset yellow FCF, acid red 13 which were 10, 2 and 2 mu g/L, respectively. The average recoveries ranged from 93.8% to 106%. The relative standard deviations were less than 3.1%. This method is rapid, accurate, highly sensitive and suitable for the quality control of low concentration and mixtures of food additives which were illegally added to wines and other foods.