Olive oil, especially extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), has been the subject of many recent scandals of adulteration and fraud. Spanish researchers have proposed a new analytical platform by coupling electrospray ionisation (ESI) with differential mobility analysis (DMA), and mass spectrometry (MS) for the analysis of olive oils based on the information obtained from the chemical fingerprint (non-targeted analyses). Two approaches for preparing the olive oil samples were proposed: (i) sample dilution and (ii) liquid–liquid extraction (LLE). In order to test the feasibility of the method, 30 olive oil samples in 3 different categories (extra vigin -EVOO, virgin -VOO, lampante - LOO) were analysed, using 21 of them to elaborate the classification model and the remaining 9 to test it (blind samples). After applying chemometrics, the overall success rate of the classification to differentiate between the EVOO, VOO), and LOO was 89% for the LLE samples and 67% for the diluted samples. However, combining both methods, the ability to differentiate EVOO from lower-quality oils (VOO and LOO), and the edible oils (EVOO and VOO) from nonedible oil (LOO) was 100%. The results show that ESI-DMA-MS has potential to become an effective tool for the olive oil sector.
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