Laura McGregor | Authors

Laura McGregor, Stefan Koschinski, and Elinor Hughes, SepSolve Analytical Assessing aroma profiles with high-capacity sorptive extraction combined with GC×GC–TOF-MS and powerful data mining software.

There are three main sub-species of cannabis—indica, sativa, and ruderalis—but there are hundreds of commercial strains based on these sub-species and their hybrids. Profiling the terpene content in these strains is vital to provide accurate labelling of cannabis-based products, but it can be very challenging. The usual technique for this—one-dimensional gas chromatography (GC)—is not always reliable when it comes to separating the diverse classes of terpenes. This article illustrates how two-dimensional GC (GC×GC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) can be used to profile cannabis terpenes with enhanced separation, resulting in the confident identification of terpenes and improved flavour interpretation.

This study demonstrates that GC–TOF-MS can be a useful approach to generate comprehensive fragrance profiles of essential oils. Peak deconvolution enables discrimination between closely eluted compounds, and soft electron ionization, assisted by comparison of ion ratios, makes it possible to discriminate between isomeric monoterpenes with very similar mass spectra at conventional 70-eV ionization energies.

This article describes the use of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) and tandem ionization for characterization and comparison of the composition of essential oils, aiding rigorous quality control.