High-resolution detection of adulteration of maize oil using multi-component compound-specific delta13C values of major and minor components and discriminant analysis.

Maize oil commands a premium price and is thus a target for adulteration with cheaper vegetable oils. Detection of this activity presents a particular challenge to the analyst because of the natural variability in the fatty acid composition of maize oils and because of their high sterol and tocopherol contents. This paper describes a method that allows detection of adulteration at concentrations of just 5% (m/m), based on the Mahalanobis distances of the principal component scores of the delta(13)C values of major and minor vegetable oil components. The method makes use of a database consisting of delta(13)C values and relative abundances of the major fatty acyl components of over 150 vegetable oils. The sterols and tocopherols of 16 maize oils and 6 potential adulterant oils were found to be depleted in (13)C by a constant amount relative to the bulk oil. Moreover, since maize oil contains particularly high levels of sterols and tocopherols, their delta(13)C values were not significantly altered when groundnut oil was added up to 20% (m/m) and it is possible to use the values for the minor components to predict the values that would be expected in a pure oil; therefore, comparison of the predicted values with those obtained experimentally allows adulteration to be detected. A refinement involved performing a discriminant analysis on the delta(13)C values of the bulk oil and the major fatty acids (16:0, 18:1 and 18:2) and using the Mahalanobis distances to determine the percentage of adulterant oil present. This approach may be refined further by including the delta(13)C values of the minor components in the discriminant analysis thereby increasing the sensitivity of the approach to concentrations at which adulteration would not be attractive economically.