Katherine Stenerson

High fat content of foods has been a problem when analyzing samples for nonpolar contaminants such as pesticides, PCBs, and PAHs. Extraction methods for these compounds tend to generate samples that are highly contaminated with fatty matrix, causing a number of problems with the subsequent chromatographic analysis. Traditional cleanup techniques, such as gel permeation chromatography (GPC) and normal phase column chromatography can be very effective, but are often expensive and time consuming. In this seminar, we will present an alternative approach to the cleanup of fats using a novel zirconia-based family of sorbents, for both QuEChERS (dispersive SPE) and traditional cartridge SPE.