Abstract: A gel permeation chromatography-phase high performance liquid chromatography (GPC-HPLC) was developed to determine benzo(a)pyrene residues in edible vegetable oils. In this method, sample pretreatment was achieved using gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and benzo(a)pyrene residues in samples were determined by reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) with fluorescence detection using retention time for qualitative analysis and external standards for quantitative analysis. The results showed that over the range from 0 to 20 μg/L, the correlation coefficient of benzo(a)pyrene was 0.9998. The detection limit of benzo(a)pyrene in edible vegetable oil was 0.1 μg/kg. The mean spike recoveries of benzo(a)pyrene were from 88.3% to 94.4% across three spike levels with a relative standard deviation (RSDs) ranging from 2.3% to 4.9%. The sensitive and accurate method allowed the determination of benzo(a)pyrene in 5 different quality control samples with satisfying results, suggesting its good applicability in practice.

Key words: edible vegetable oil, benzo(a)pyrene, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC)