Lipid profiling of boar tainted and untainted pig plasma using GC×GC-TOFMS (Kinjal Bhatt, MDCW 2023)

• 🎤 Presenter: Kinjal Bhatt, Thibaut Dejong, Pierre-Hugues Stefanuto, Jean- François Focant (Organic and Biological Analytical Chemistry Group (OBiAChem), University of Liège, Liege, Belgium)

  💡 Book in your calendar: 15th Multidimensional Chromatography Workshop (MDCW) January 2024

15th Multidimensional Chromatography (MDC) Workshop 2024

Abstract

Boar taint is a strong, unpleasant smell or taste found in the meat of some uncastrated male pigs. The surgical castration of male piglets is a traditional practice to prevent boar taint meat worldwide. Furthermore, it is performed without anesthesia or analgesia, causing pain to the piglets. European pork production stakeholders agreed to prohibit surgical castration of piglets due to increased animal welfare concerns by 2018. These objectives are yet to be achieved successfully.

The aim of work was to understand the difference between boar-tainted (BT) pigs and untainted (UT) pigs based on the fatty acid profiling of pig serum using two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC×GC-TOFMS).

In GC, conversion into a more volatile and stable component is essential to analyze saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. To improve measurement efficiency and obtain chromatographic separation of the lipids, a two-step sample extraction and derivatization (base-catalyzed transesterification and acid-catalyzed esterification) approach was optimized using DoE. The optimized condition has a composite desirability of 0.9159. A total of 40 pig serum samples were analyzed. The chemometric tests, unsupervised screening (PCA, HCA), univariate analysis (Volcano plot), and multivariate supervised analysis (PLS-DA) were performed.

The results suggested that the concentration of PUFA ω-6 and cholesterol derivatives were significantly increased in BT pigs, whereas SFA and PUFA ω-3 were increased in UT pigs. These differences in the lipid composition are opening new investigation routes to better understand bore taint deviation.