Simultaneous determination of 23 amino acids and 7 biogenic amines in fermented food samples by liquid chromatography/quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry

A novel liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC–Q-TOFMS) method was developed for the simultaneous determination of 23 amino acids and 7 biogenic amines in food samples. These analytes were pre-column derivatized with dansyl chloride and then separated in an Acquity™ column (1.7 μm; 2.1 mm × 100 mm). The separation of 31 compounds including an internal standard was achieved within 25 min at a flow rate of 0.2 mL/min. The method linearity for each amino acid and biogenic amine had a relatively wide range with r2 > 0.99. The intra- and inter-day precision, expressed as relative standard deviation (RSD), ranged from 1.1 to 4.6% and from 2.0 to 11.2%, respectively. The limit of detection was between 0.005 and 0.4 μg/mL. With a simple dilution, recoveries of around 80–120% were obtained for most of the compounds. No significant matrix effect was observed, and the developed method was successfully applied to the analysis of amino acids and biogenic amines in beer, cheese and sausage samples.