Simultaneous Determination of 85 Acid Synthetic Pigments in Sauce by Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry

A high-throughput liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method was developed for the determination of 85 acid synthetic pigments in sauce. The acid synthetic pigments were extracted with methanol, purified with C₁₈ and diluted with water. Subsequently, the sample was analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry under multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode, and quantified by external standard method. The results showed that the method had a good linearity in the range of 10~1000 ng/mL which correlation coefficients were greater than 0.99. The detection limit of the method was 8.08~885.2 μg/kg, and the quantitative limit was 26.94~2950.7 μg/kg. The average recoveries of synthetic pigments from spiked samples ranged from 70.2% to 116.5%, and the relative standard deviations were between 0.1% and 15.0%. This method was applied to analyze 50 batches of sauce such as tomato sauce and chili sauce, acid red 13 and acid orange II were screened out. The method has strong universality, wide range of detection objects, short analysis time and high sensitivity. It is suitable for the determination of 85 acid synthetic pigments in sauce.