New Restek EU PAH 15+1 Standard Separated on Rxi-PAH GC Column

Many of you may know that Restek recently developed and released a standard to support the determination of certain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in food because they may be genotoxic and carcinogenic to humans.  You can find details on the EFSA Scientific Opinion that lists the so-called 15+1 PAHs here.  Hopefully you also know that we have an excellent Rxi-PAH GC column that separates these 16 PAHs from other potential interfering PAHs, which is not trivial in the land of isobaric congeners. 

Shown below are some separations I was able to achieve using the Rxi-PAH with GC-FID, after translating a method that my colleague Chris Rattray gave me that he developed for GC-MS.  I’m using the 40m x 0.18mm x 0.07µm format, which is the column we built for speed while still rugged enough to be used for food analysis.  Importantly, I also show the potential interferences in two of the chromatograms below, and I even threw in a bonus zoomed-in chromatogram for the NIST 2260a standard to demonstrate the dibenz anthracenes separations on the Rxi-PAH.  Those too can be subject to bias on other GC columns.

If you’ve selected another Rxi-PAH column format, or are using GC-MS, or are using hydrogen carrier gas (or all of the above!), give the Method Translator a try and you’ll separate the EU 15+1 PAHs, from each other and interferences, too.

Analyte	Name
1*	Benzo[c]fluorene
2	Benz[a]anthracene
3	Cyclopenta[cd]pyrene
4	Chrysene
5	5-Methylchrysene
6	Benzo[b]fluoranthene
7	Benzo[k]fluoranthene
8	Benzo[j]fluoranthene
9	Benzo[a]pyrene
10	Indeno[1,2,3-cd]pyrene
11	Dibenz[a,h]anthracene
12	Benzo[ghi]perylene
13	Dibenzo[a,l]pyrene
14	Dibenzo[a,e]pyrene
15	Dibenzo[a,i]pyrene
16	Dibenzo[a,h]pyrene