LAUSR

The problems of contamination of many products by nitroso compounds have been discussed since 1970's and have been partially solved, namely, the contamination by carcinogenic volatile N-nitrosamines. However, there is still a gap in knowing non-volatile nitroso compounds in terms of both the determination of these compounds and the description of their toxicity. Therefore, a procedure for their detailed non-targeted study is necessary to be developed. Based on these facts, a new method permitting the detection and the classification of nitroso compound groups, such as N-nitroso, C-nitroso, and interfering substances in the nitrosamine specific chemiluminescence detection after previous gas chromatographic separation, was developed. The method is based on signal profiling of chromatographic peaks recorded by a chemiluminescence detector at different pyrolytic temperatures and subsequent multivariate chemometric classification. The resulting classification function by linear discriminant analysis shows good performance with total accuracy of 96.12% after the method validation. The method was successfully applied and demonstrated on a non-targeted beer sample analysis. Nitroso compounds detected by the method were selected for detailed structural analysis by GC-MS/MS. The combination of the presented method with the MS/MS instrumentation provides a really powerful analytical tool for the identification of unknown nitroso compounds in complex samples. This study represents a valuable contribution to the protocols of identification of organic compounds with the nitrogen functional groups - toxicologically and analytically important nitroso compounds.