Classification and analysis of corn steep liquor by UPLC/Q-TOF MS and HPLC

Corn steep liquor (CSL), an important raw material with high nutritional value, serves as a nitrogen source in the fermentation industry. The CSL quality directly affects the yield and quality of fermentation products. In this work, a fingerprinting technique was used to identify the potential markers of CSL. Forty-two CSL samples from different manufacturers were profiled by ultra-performance liquid chromatography with tandem quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Sixteen compounds, almost all of which were amino acids and their derivatives, were considered as the potential markers. Then, o-phthalaldehyde-9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate precolumn derivatization by high-performance liquid chromatography was performed to identify the free amino acids in CSL. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to distinguish among the samples from different manufacturers. The results demonstrated that the fingerprinting technique combined with PCA analysis was a powerful tool for determining the CSL quality.