A single step solid-phase extraction method for complete separation of sterol oxidation products in food lipids

One of the crucial steps in determination of sterol oxidation products (SOPs) in foods is their enrichment and purifications by various preparative methods for further analysis by GC and GC–MS. Among the preparative methods, SPE of various adsorbents and solvent systems, are being used most widely. At present, no single step SPE method is suitable to completely separate the SOPs. In this study, a SPE (1 g silica) method, suitable for both transesterified and cold saponified oil samples, was developed to separate completely SOPs from other lipid components. This method resulted in high recovery from rapeseed oil of added 5β,6β-epoxycholestan-3β-ol (94-96%), cholest-5-en-3β-ol-7-one(94%), cholestane-3β,5α,6β-triol (88–91%), cholest-5-en-3β,7α-diol and 5α,6α-epoxycholestan-3β-ol (88–90%). The method has a high sample capacity of up to 1 g transesterified or cold-saponified oil sample. The method was tested and applied to different vegetable oils and to monitor the effects of refining processes on POPs in hazelnut oil.     

Novel solid-phase extraction method to separate 4-desmethyl-, 4-monomethyl-, and 4,4'-dimethylsterols in vegetable oils

Conventional methods for sterol fractions separation by TLC have some drawbacks such as low recovery and time consuming. A new solid-phase extraction (SPE) method was developed with stepwise elution by increasing the polarity of solvents mixture: n-hexane and diethyl ether. This method was applied to separate sterol fractions of hazelnut and virgin olive oils, and our results were compared with those of TLC method. The recovery of spiked authentic sample of 4-desmethylsterols in oil was higher with the SPE method (94%) compared with the TLC method (62%). The amount of 4,4'-dimethylsterols and 4-desmethylsterols separated with SPE in both hazelnut and virgin olive oil samples were at least 75% and 35%, respectively, higher than that of TLC. Generally, both methods obtained similar results for 4-monomethylsterols of the two oils. This new SPE method to separate phytosterol fractions was less time consuming, simpler and can be used instead of preparative TLC to detect adulteration of virgin olive oil with hazelnut oil.     

Type-II Intermittency from Markov Binary Block Visibility Graph Perspective

In this work, we study the type-II intermittency based on asymptotic modes and the optimized Markov binary visibility graphs perspective. In fact, we investigate the behavior of a dynamical system in the vicinity of subcritical Hopf bifurcations of pre-fixed point, fixed point, and post-fixed point using networks language. We use self maps in order to generate asymptotic modes in the type-II intermittency. We find their properties based on statistical tools such as the length between reinjection points and the mean length and also length distributions. Numerical results show that asymptotic modes affect on the trajectory and the length between reinjection points of type-II intermittency in situations of pre-fixed point, fixed point, and post-fixed point, however their mean length are approximately similar to each other. For further illustration, we compute the degree distribution of the complex network generated by type-II intermittency. Experimental results are found to agree well with the analytical results derived from the optimized Markov binary visibility graph.