Method Development and Validation for the Quantification of Acrylamide in Potato Chips and Other Locally Available Food by LC-MS/MS in Bangladesh

Abstract

A sensitive, precise, accurate and simple in house validated Liquid Chromatography and Tandem mass spectrometric (LC-MS/MS) analytical method was developed for the quantification of acrylamide in potato chips, a probable carcinogenic and neurotoxic compound in fried food items. Acrylamide was extracted and cleaned up by QuEChERS method, then analyzed by triple qu adrupole mass spectrophotometer using positive electrospray-ionization mode and d3-Acrylamide internal standard. The analyte and internal standard were separated on a reversed - phase C18 column (100 × 2.0 mm, 2.5 μm) by gradient elution with water and methanol containing 0.1% formic acid as mobile phase. The analytical method was fully validated by assessment of linearity, specificity, precision, accuracy, selectivity and robustness with relative standard deviation of less than 4%. The calibration curves were found linear with correlation coefficient (r 2 ) of 0.9997 over the concentration range 5 - 500 μg/L. The recoveries of Acrylamide in the concentration of 250, 400, and 500 μg/L were 97% to 104%. Based on the signal to noise ratio, the lower limit of detection (LOD) and lower limit of quantification (LOQ) were achieved 2.0 μg/L and 4.0 μg/L respectively. The proposed method was also applied to other available most popular 24 types of food (265 number of sample ) first time in Bangladesh. The highest level of acrylamide has been found in fried products with the range of 197.04 μg/L to 114.63 μg/L, protein - rich food lies between 79.76 to 89.14 μg/L whereas baked food products exhibited less content in the range of 35.23 to 51.17 μg/L.