Derivatization followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry for quantification of ethyl carbamate in alcoholic beverages.

A sensitive and rapid analytical methodology based on derivatization followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was developed for the quantitative determination of the toxic contaminant ethyl carbamate (EC, urethane, C(2)H(5)OCONH(2)) in alcoholic samples. EC was extracted using liquid-liquid extraction technique, and then silylated with bis-(trimethylsilyl)trifluoroacetamide, analysed finally by GC-MS. The isopropyl carbamate was used as the internal standard for quantitative analysis of EC in alcoholic samples. In this work, the sample extraction and derivatization reaction conditions were investigated, and the optimal extraction conditions obtained were: pH 9 and solvent of ethyl acetate, and the derivatization conditions were: derivatization reaction temperature of 80°C and time duration of 30 min. With the optimal conditions, the method validations were also studied. In the validation studies, EC exhibited good linearity with a regression coefficient of 0.9999. The limit of detection and limit of quantification were 0.30 and 5.0 μg/kg, respectively. The precision was less than 8.4%. Finally, the proposed technique was successfully applied to the analysis of EC in 35 kinds of alcoholic samples. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed technique is a fast, reliable and low-cost method for determination of EC in alcoholic samples.