Analysis of the Carotenoid Composition in Overripe Fruits by Advanced Liquid Chromatography Techniques

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com bioactive, and their use could be diverted towards either in the animal feed production, or to the recovery of purified molecules for nutraceutical purposes. Since they occur in complex mixture for their analyses a very advanced analytical liquid chromatography technique was employed. Such a technique is called ccomprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC×LC) and it is based on the combination of two independent separation steps with orthogonal selectivity. In LC×LC, a primary column is connected to one or more secondary column by means of a switching valve as an interface. The function of the interface is to isolate continuous fractions of the first dimension column (1D) effluent and then release them onto the second dimension (2D) column; in this way the entire sample is analysed in both dimensions, and very high values of peak capacities are obtained [6,7]. In that study a normal phase × reversed phase (NP×RP) set-up was developed, consisting of a micro-bore (1.0 mm I.D.) cyano column for the 1D separation, interfaced to a 2D C18 column packed with fused-core particles (30 × 4.6 mm; 2.7 μm), coupled with both photodiode array (PDA) and mass spectrometry (MS) detectors [8].