Author: Herr Dr. Amoneit
Last saved by: Saritas, Sevim

Reliability of the ΔECN42 Limit and Global Method for Olive Oil Purity Assessment using different Analytical Approaches 
Marco Beccaria^a, Giorgia Purcaro^b, Peter Q. Tranquida^a, Paola Dugo^a,c,d, 
Luigi Mondello^a,c,d
^a Dipartimento di Scienze del Farmaco e dei Prodotti per la Salute (SCIFAR), 
University of Messina, 98168 Italy
^b Dipartimento di Scienze degli Alimenti, University of Udine, 33100 Udine, Italy
^c Centro Integrato di Ricerca (C.I.R.), University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Rome, Italy
^d Chromaleont s.r.l. A start-up of the University of Messina, c/o Dipartimento SCIFAR, University of Messina, 98168 Messina, Italy

Virgin (VOO) and extra virgin olive oils (EVOO) are important ingredients of the Mediterranean diet. Being olive oil a rather expensive product, frauds are frequent rendering authentication assessment of great importance. Several analytical methods have been introduced by international organisms involved in olive oil regulation (European Union -EU-, International Olive Council -IOC-, and the Codex Alimentarius) to attempt to protect olive oil from adulteration and sophistication. In this work, two data elaboration approaches for evaluating olive oils authenticity were compared: I) the determination of the difference between the theoretical and actual amount of triacylglycerols with partition number (PN) 42 (PN=number of carbons - 2x number of double bonds) (ΔECN42 ≤│0.2│); and II) the global method, which considers also PN 44 and 46 (returning a “correct”/”not correct” result). Analysis of 31 genuine extra virgin olive oil samples was performed using different analytical methods, namely liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with a refractive index detector (RID) and LC coupled with a mass spectrometry detector (MS), and the results obtained were compared. Several false positives were highlighted considering the ΔECN42 limit with both instrumental approaches. Instead, the global method algorithm returned “correct” results for all the analysed samples (except for two samples which gave no results at all) with the LC-MS instrument; on the other hand 10 false positives were obtained elaborating the data deriving from the NARP-LC-RID analysis.