2025/06/06 by Phuong Mai Le, Markus Greule, Stanislav Sokolenko +7 · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · #Biochemical and biochemical processes #Fermentation and Sensory Analysis #Tea Polyphenols and Effects
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s00216-025-05920-1
openalex publication_date 2025/06/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract Stable isotope analyses are powerful techniques to detect counterfeiting of food products, especially in vanillin, one of the world’s most popular flavors used in food and pharmaceutical industries. Although a stable carbon isotopic ratio provides an invaluable new source of isotopic information, the analysis of the hydrogen site-specific ( 2 H/ 1 H) isotopic distribution in vanillin gives valuable complementary isotopic information allowing a complete isotopic fingerprint of the vanillin molecule for authentication. However, there are only a limited number of studies that compare the validity of the results obtained by IRMS and NMR. Here, we present site-specific isotope analysis (also known as position-specific isotope analysis, PSIA) of hydrogen isotopic measurements of vanillin by two independent measurement methods, 2 H-qNMR and GC-IRMS, and compare the results obtained by these two methods. 2 H-qNMR allows isotopic measurements of all hydrogen atoms (except for OH) of the vanillin molecule while GC-IRMS measures only the hydrogen atoms of the methoxy group (H5). 2 H/ 1 H values of the vanillin H5 from six vanillin demonstrate remarkable agreement between the two techniques with uncertainty well below 1%. Position-specific GC-IRMS on the methoxy group measurements provides three-fold smaller measurement uncertainties while requiring a considerably smaller sample size compared to 2 H-qNMR. This quantitative hydrogen isotopic study extends our previous successful work comparing and validating the stable carbon isotopic of the vanillin methoxy group using 13 C-qNMR and GC-IRMS. Compound-specific isotope analysis (CSIA) using GC-IRMS was also described in this work. Both qNMR and partial PSIA GC-IRMS can be considered as complementary analytical methods, and their combined use provides reliable results. Graphical Abstract