Total Extractable Fat Using Pressurised Liquid Extraction (PLE)

Introduction

Regulating fat content is essential to maintaining the quality of food and feed products. The food industry extracts total fat from food samples to analyse for Priority Organic Pollutants (POPs). For several compounds of concern like PCB and PBDE congeners, results are often expressed in amount for gram of lipid.

Traditionally performed by Soxhlet extraction, fat determination is a time consuming process requiring large volumes of solvent and lengthy extraction times. By using pressurised liquid extraction, the entire extraction process can be performed in under an hour resulting in higher throughput.

The following application details the use of the FMS, Inc PLE sytem for the extraction of total fat from a variety of sample matrices.

Instrumentation and Consumables

• FMS, Inc. PLE system
• FMS, Inc. SuperVap™ Concentrator
• FMS, Inc. 200 mL direct-to-vial concentrator tubes
• Mettler Toledo analytical balance
• FMS, Inc PLE extraction cells (10, 20 40 mL)

*Alloy 20 cells required for Hydrolysis

Consumables

• Fisher Pesticide Optima* n-Hexane
• Agilent Hydromatrix
• FMS PLE re-usable end caps