Volatile Compounds Fingerprints for White Duck down and White Goose down Determined by Gas Chromatography-Ion Mobility Spectrometry

Abstract

This work first describes a simple approach for the untargeted profiling of volatile compounds for distinguishing between white duck down (WDD) and white goose down (WGD) based on resolution-optimized GC-IMS combined with optimized chemometric techniques, namely PCA. The detection method for down samples was established by using GC-IMS. Meanwhile, the reason of unpleasant odors caused by WDD was explained on the basis of the characteristic volatile compounds identification. GC-IMS fingerprinting can be considered a revolutionary approach for a truly fully automatable, cost-efficient, and in particular highly sensitive method. A total of 22 compounds were successfully separated and identified through GC-IMS method, and the significant differences in volatile compounds were observed in three parts of WDD and WGD samples. The most characteristic volatile compounds of WGD belong to aldehydes, whereas carboxylic acids from WDD were detected generated by autoxidation reaction. Meanwhile, the main reason of unpleasant odor generation was possibly attributed to the high concentration of volatile carboxylic acids of WDD. Therefore, the constructed model presents a simple and efficient method of analysis and serves as a basis for down processing and quality control.