Abstract
•A novel nanoUPLC-MSE workflow method that has potential to identify origin of gelatin was presented.•After prior extraction, tryptic gelatin peptides were separated with nanoUPLC-ESI-q-TOF-MSE in dairy products.•The novelty of this setup was that it functioned in a data independent mode.•This enabled accurate mass acquisition on peptide level to identify gelatin peptides.•The marker peptides specific for porcine and bovine could be successfully detected.
We presented a novel nanoUPLC-MSE workflow method that has potential to identify origin of gelatin in some dairy products; yoghurt, cheese and ice cream. In this study, the method was performed in two steps. In the first step, gelatin was extracted from these products before the MS-sample preparation. In the second step, tryptic gelatin peptides were separated and analyzed with ultra-performance liquid chromatography and electrospray ionization quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (nanoUPLC-ESI-q-TOF-MSE). The novelty of this setup was that it functioned in a data independent acquisition mode and that alternate low and elevated collision energy was applied to acquire precursor and product ion information. This enabled accurate mass acquisition on the peptide level to identify the gelatin peptides. The marker peptides specific for porcine and bovine could be successfully detected in the gelatin added to the dairy products analyzed, revealing that the detection of marker peptides in the digested gelatin samples using nanoUPLC-ESI-q-TOF-MSE could be an effective method to differentiate porcine and bovine gelatin in the dairy products.