Determination of volatile components in cut tobacco with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and chemometric resolution

Chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used to analyze the volatile components of cut tobacco samples with the help of heuristic evolving latent projections (HELP). After extracting with simultaneous distillation and extraction method, the volatile components in cut tobacco were detected by GC-MS. Then the obtained original two-dimensional data were resolved into pure mass spectra and chromatograms. The qualitative analysis was performed by similarity searches in the national institute of standards and technology(NIST) mass database with the obtained pure mass spectrum of each component and the quantitative results were obtained by calculating the volume of total two-way response. The accuracy of qualitative and quantitative results were greatly improved by using the two-dimensional comprehensive information of chromatograms and mass spectra. 107 of 141 separated constituents in the total ion chromatogram of the volatile components were identified and quantified, accounting for about 88.01% of the total content. The result proves that the developed method is powerful for the analysis of complex cut tobacco samples.