Abstract:

A method to determine formaldehyde in foods by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with
fluorescence detection following derivatization with acetylacetone was established. The HPLC method was performed
on an Eclipse XDB-C18 (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) column by isocratic elution using acetonitrile (20%)/water (80%)
as mobile phase, and the detection was done by a fluorescence detector at an excitation wavelength of 416 nm and an
emission wavelength of 505 nm. Formaldehyde was quantified by an external standard method. Under optimal experimental
conditions, good linearity was observed in the range of 0.001–20.0 mg/L with a correlation coefficient of 0.999 9. The
relative standard deviations (RSD) are 4.2%, 1.9%, 1.4% and 0.81% for 0.005, 0.05, 0.5 and 5.0 mg/L of formaldehyde,
respectively. The limit of detection (LOD) was 0.025 mg/kg for solid and powder samples, and 0.025 mg/L for liquid
samples. The method described here was applied to the analysis of dried mushroom samples, wheat flour samples and beer
samples, and the recoveries of formaldehyde obtained were in the range of 92.0%–97.7% with relative standard deviations
(RSD) lower than 5.6%. The results showed that the proposed method was highly selective, rapid, convenient and reliable
and could be used for the determination of formaldehyde in food samples.

Key words: food, formaldehyde, acetylacetone, high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (HPLC-FLD)