Accelerated solvent extraction for GC-based tobacco fingerprinting and its comparison with simultaneous distillation and extraction

An accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) procedure has been developed as a pretreatment method for chemical fingerprinting of volatile and semi-volatile components in cut tobacco. The ASE extraction conditions including temperature, operation pressure and extraction cycles were optimized to maximize extraction yield. The method was validated with repeatability, recovery and linearity. Compared with simultaneous distillation extraction (SDE), ASE provides higher extraction yields, less extraction time, lower solvent consumption and less labor time, and is more suitable for tobacco sample preparation. A typical ASE extract was analyzed by gas chromatography/time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC–TOFMS). A total of 305 components with signal-to-noise ratio higher than 100 were tentatively identified by NIST05 and Wiley database. Finally, 36 cigarette samples from six cigarette brands were analyzed using the developed chemical fingerprinting method. Partial least squares-discriminant analysis shows good discrimination of different cigarette brands. The results indicate that ASE method can serve as high-throughput sample preparation technique for cigarette chemical fingerprint analysis.