Quality control of camellia oil based on HPLC fingerprinting techniques combined with chemometric methods for triglycerides

Abstract Triglycerides (TAGs) play an important role in the physiological function of vegetable oils. Camellia oil has a variety of good physiological functions. Therefore, a qualitative and quantitative method for the determination of TAGs in camellia oil by high‐performance liquid chromatography‐diode array detector/electro spray ionization mass spectrometry was developed. The 16 TAGs that separated were identified and quantified by peak‐area normalization. In addition, the major TAGs in camellia oil were OOO (25.25%), OLO (20.72%), POL (9.23%), OLL (8.22%), and OOP (8.22%). Moreover, the content of oleic acid in camellia oil was 81.74%. Using fingerprint techniques, 15 common peaks in 12 samples were selected as characteristic peaks to evaluate the differences in the composition of camellia oil samples. In addition, the samples were further classified by chemometric methods. It is shown that the camellia oil samples with high similarity from two cities in the main producing areas of Zhejiang province could be further classified according to the planting areas by the combination of chromatographic fingerprints and chemometric methods.