Advantages of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography for comprehensive analysis of potential migrants from food contact materials.

All substances migrating from food contact materials (FCMs), such as packagings, into food must be safe. This presupposes comprehensive analysis of all constituents potentially reaching a concentration in food that may be of toxicological concern. There is no single technique meeting this task and usually several need to be combined. In many cases, comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) is the best technique available to start with. It provides high resolution and an overview in well-structured plots, grouping similar substances in a manner facilitating identifications. Further, flame ionization detection (FID) enables approximate quantitation without standards, and electron impact (EI) fragmentation in mass spectrometry (MS) provides access to large libraries for identification. GC is limited in amenable molecular mass, but the characterization of the lower mass constituents is usually helpful also for the identification of higher mass ones by techniques like HPLC-MS. The scope of this paper is to advocate the use of GCxGC for comprehensive migrate analysis, based on advantages illustrated by examples.