Efficiencies of Acid and Base-Catalyzed Methylation of Vegetable Oils by Ambient Mass Spectrometry

The fatty acids (FA) profile is an important parameter for quality control and typification for foods in general. These profiles work as a sort of "fingerprint", and may be useful to monitor frauds and deterioration of diverse types of foods. For vegetable oils, the FA profile is commonly determined after hydrolysis, methylation and gas chromatography (GC) analysis. In this work, the acid and base-catalyzed soybean oil methylation methods was monitored via GC-FID and also by ambient sonic-spray ionization mass spectrometry (EASI-MS). The base-catalyzed method is much superior regarding other esterification assays, because it is cheaper, less toxic, no oxidation products are formed and its reaction yield is greater (95.66% m/m against 92.86% and 94.51% from acid-catalyzed methylation methods, respectively)