Robust quality control (QC) of essential oils is required to ensure purity or authenticity, prevent adulteration and maintain consistent levels of quality and safety.
Essential oils, such as citrus oils, are widely used for flavouring and fragrances, but their compositions can differ considerably due to different plant phenotypes, growing conditions and extraction techniques. Furthermore, expensive lemon oils can be subject to economic adulteration. It is therefore important to have fast analytical workflows for routine QC testing, to ensure consumers do not receive an inferior product.
While GC–MS instrumentation is constantly evolving, allowing us to gain greater insight into our samples’ compositions than ever before, it often results in data processing becoming a ‘bottleneck’.
ChromCompare+ is a powerful chemometrics platform to transform complex 1D or 2D GC–MS data into meaningful and usable results through automated, easy-to-use workflows.
Here, we will demonstrate the use of ChromCompare+ software to identify significant differences between batches of lemon oils using all of the raw GC–MS data.[1] This innovative approach will be shown to minimise laborious preprocessing steps, reduce the risk of missing important details and enable simple classification of unknown samples.