Direct injection analysis of fruit VOCs by PTR-ToF-MS: the apple case study

The instrumental characterization of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is essential to have a precise, reliable, and reproducible estimation of food aroma and, therefore, of the overall product quality. In this report, we introduce four analytical approaches based on PTR-MS (proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry) technology suitable to fully investigate the complexity of apple aroma. In our opinion, these proposed methodologies can be applied, with slight modification, to every kind of fruit for destructive and nondestructive rapid VOC fingerprinting