Determination of volatile organic acids in tobacco by single-drop microextraction with in-syringe derivatization followed by GC-MS.

In this work, the novel technique based on headspace single-drop microextraction with in-syringe derivatization followed by GC-MS was established to determine the volatile organic acids in tobacco. The parameters for headspace single-drop microextraction and in-syringe derivatization were optimized, including extraction time, and volume of derivatization reagent and in-syringe derivatization time. The method validations including linearity, precision, recovery and LOD were also studied. The obtained results illustrated that the optimized technique was easy, highly efficient and sensitive. Finally, the proposed method was successfully applied to the analyses of volatile organic acids in tobacco samples with seven different brands. It was further demonstrated that the present technique developed in this study does offer a simple and fast approach to determine volatile organic acids in tobacco.