Quantification of primary fatty acid amides in commercial tallow and tallow fatty acid methyl esters by HPLC-APCI-MS

Primary fatty acid amides are a group of biologically highly active compounds which were already identified in nature. Here, these substances were determined in tallow and tallow fatty acid methyl esters for the first time. As tallow is growing in importance as an oleochemical feedstock for the soap manufacturing, the surfactant as well as the biodiesel industry, the amounts of primary fatty acid amides have to be considered. As these compounds are insoluble in tallow as well as in the corresponding product e.g. tallow fatty acid methyl esters, filter plugging can occur. For the quantification in these matrices a purification step and a LC-APCI-MS method were developed. Although quantification of these compounds can be performed by GC-MS, the presented approach omitted any derivatization and increased the sensitivity by two orders of magnitude. Internal standard calibration using heptadecanoic acid amide and validation of the method yielded a limit of detection of 18.5 fmol and recoveries for the tallow and fatty acid methyl ester matrices of 93% and 95%, respectively. A group of commercially available samples were investigated for their content of fatty acid amides resulting in an amount of up to 0.54%m/m (g per 100 g) in tallow and up to 0.16%m/m (g per 100 g) in fatty acid methyl esters.