Determination of heterocyclic aromatic amines in food products: Automation of the sample preparation method prior to HPLC and HPLC-MS quantification

Heat-processing protein-rich foods may cause the formation of heterocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs), all of which have mutagenic and some also carcinogenic potential. Accurately measuring HAA levels in food products is therefore a necessary to realistically assess this risk factor. A solid-phase extraction method for quantitative HAA analysis has been developed by us over the last few years. This method has recently been automated using a robotic workstation and now allows almost unattended sample preparation, a process which saves a human operator about five hours of benchwork. Cleaned-up samples were analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and ultraviolet (UV) or mass spectrometric (MS) detection. While HPLC-UV remains the daily tool to quantify HAAs, we found HPLC-electrospray-MS to be an alternative detection method with unique advantages, suited for both HAA identification and quantification.