Determination of docosahexaenoic acid in milk powder by gas chromatography using acid hydrolysis

A method to determine docosahexenoic acid (DHA) in milk powder by gas chromatography was established. The milk powder samples were hydrolyzed with hydrochloric acid, extracted to get total fatty acids by Soxhlet extractor, then esterified with potassium hydroxide methanol solution to form methyl esters, and treated with sodium hydrogen sulfate. The optimal experiment conditions were obtained from orthogonal experiment L9(3(3)) which performed with three factors and three levels, and it requires the reaction performed with 1 mol/L potassium hydroxide solution at 25 degrees C for 5 min. The derivative treated with sodium hydrogen sulfate was separated on a column of SP-2560 (100 m x 0.25 mm x 0.20 μm), and determined in 55 min by temperature programming-gas chromatography. Good linearity was obtained in the range 5.0-300 mg/L with the correlation coefficient of 0.999 9. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) were 3.4%, 1.2% and 1.1% for the seven repeated experiments of 10, 50 and 100 mg/L of DHA, respectively. The limit of detection was 2 mg/kg, and the recoveries of DHA were in the range of 90.4%-93.5%. The results are satisfactory through the tests of practical samples.