Abstract
Organic acids in honeys are currently quantified by enzymatic, capillary zone electrophoresis, and chromatographic methods; however, these methods have long analysis times and low sensitivities and selectivities. Here, we developed a simple, rapid liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS)–based method for the determination of organic acids: gluconic acid, tartaric acid, malic acid, citric acid, and succinic acid in honey. First, we evaluated the linearity, matrix effects, detection limits, quantification limits, and repeatability of our method; the limit of detection for organic acids ranged from 0.005 to 0.70 mg/kg. In this study, it was 8 to 31 times higher sensitive than the high-performance liquid chromatography method. We then used our method to determine the concentrations of gluconic acid, tartaric acid, malic acid, citric acid, and succinic acid in 25 honey samples. Gluconic acid was found to account for 64.6 to 99.8% of the total organic acids in the samples. From the correlation and statistical analysis of each component, it is considered that the organic acid is produced by worker bee enzymes such as glucose oxidase and the TCA cycle. The developed method, which has high sensitivity and selectivity, will enable the analysis of more complex and low-concentration components.
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Funding
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, Scientific Research (B) [grant numbers 15H02980, 18H03393]; the Promotion of Joint International Research of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan [grant number 16KK0015]; a Health and Labor Sciences Research Grant (H25, Research on Food Safety) from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Japan; and the Urakami Foundation for Food and Food Culture Promotion. Ryoichi Motoyashiki and Ryo Nemoto (Akita Prefectural University, Japan) contributed greatly to the discussion about this research.
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Momoka Suto declares that she has no conflict of interest. Hiroto Kawashima declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yasunori Nakamura declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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Suto, M., Kawashima, H. & Nakamura, Y. Determination of Organic Acids in Honey by Liquid Chromatography with Tandem Mass Spectrometry. Food Anal. Methods 13, 2249–2257 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-020-01845-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-020-01845-w