Overcoming the lack of reliability associated to monodimensional gas chromatography coupled to isotopic ratio mass spectrometry data by heart-cut two-dimensional gas chromatography

The use of IRMS as a GC detector has a history going back decades, however the critical issue of wrong δ13C measurements resulting from impure peaks has been often underestimated. To this regard, multidimensional separation techniques are effective tools to improve the reliability of the data, with respect to those obtained after monodimensional analysis. The present research aims to draw attention to one critical issue, related to the reliability of the δ13C data obtained by means of monodimensional GC-C-IRMS. Although already known from the literature, such aspect has been greatly overlooked, as is reflected in the few papers reporting the use of MDGC, among the plethora of published research dealing with GC-C-IRMS applications. Hereby, a set of natural samples of complex composition were analysed to investigate the presence of minor or even undetected coelutions, and to which extent it affected the isotope ratio determination. Apart from chromatographic effects, and issues related to analytes conversion to CO2 prior to IRMS measurement, unpredictable co-elutions with compounds, either resulting from oxidation or intentionally added in fraudulent practices, could also contribute to a shift of the δ13C data, up to 10‰ and higher. Last, the influence of column bleed was investigated, as affecting the determination of the δ13C data for compounds that were eluted at high temperatures. It was finally demonstrated by the selected key studies that implementation of MDGC separation is mandatory to prevent the aforementioned issues, aiming to guarantee accurate results. In the light of the above conclusions, and considering the level of automation of heart-cut devices nowadays available, routine practice of MDGC results highly recommendable in any IRMS applications.