Simultaneous and rapid determination of sesamin and sesamolin in sesame oils using excitation-emission matrix fluorescence coupled with self-weighted alternating trilinear decomposition

BACKGROUND Sesamin and sesamolin are two typical and important lignans isolated from sesame oil. Various studies have shown the bioactivity, physiological activity, and potential health benefits of the two components. In this study, a rapid method for the simultaneous determination of sesamin and sesamolin in sesame oils was proposed. The excitation-emission fluorescence spectra of the oils were obtained after a simple pretreatment, then self-weighted alternating trilinear decomposition was used to extract the quantitative information from the very overlapping spectra. RESULTS It was found that reasonable quantification results could be obtained with the limits of detection for the two lignans. These limits were 0.05 mg/g and 0.24 mg/g, and the limits of quantitation were 0.14 mg/g and 0.74 mg/g, respectively. The average recoveries for sesamin and sesamolin were 99.05% and 94.97%. CONCLUSION The results indicate that, with simple sample pretreatment, the application for combining excitation-emission fluorescence spectra and self-weighted alternating trilinear decomposition can be a useful and sensitive tool for the determination of lignans in sesame oil. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry