Quick Separation of the Main Components of Fatty Acid Methyl Esters by Capillary Gas Chromatography:What Is the Shortest Time?

「1 Introduction」 Fatty acid profiles (showing the fatty acid content) of vegetable, fish and animal oils are determined by gas chromatography (GC), after converting the oils to fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs). 1 Getting these profiles is an important job in lipid chemistry and also in the food industry. Before running the GC instrument, the analyst decides on the following:the kind of column, the column temperature (C.Temp.), the kind of carrier gas and the linear gas velocity (L.G.Vel.). The amount of time it takes for the GC run and the precision of the fatty acid profiles depend on these four variables. To illustrate, at a research center, an analyst may use a longer length column with high-resolution2-6 and a standard L.G.Vel., resulting in a long GC run time, to get a detailed fatty acid profile showing all the components of the FAMEs;but at a food manufacturing plant, an analyst may increase the L.G.Vel. and the C.Temp., resulting in a short GC run time, to get a fatty acid profile showing only the main components of the FAMEs.