A Simple Method for the Separation of Furyl Furamide in Foods

Abstract

According to the methods by Arai et al. and Kanno et al. for the chemical assay of 2- (2-furyl) -3- (5-nitro-2-furyl) acryl amide (furyl furamide, FF), FF in a food can be extracted with acidulated toluene-butyl acetate mixture, followed by separation of FF in the solvent fraction by means of an alumina column chromatography. However, the recovery of FF in the aforementioned methods was not so high as 80 to 90% sometimes being as low as 60%.
In the present study, a new simple method was devised for the separation of FF in foods by means of partition column chromatography, and by this method, fairly high recovery of FF was obtained as can be seen in Table 2 and Fig. 5. Outline of the new method is as follows:
(1) About 3g of the minced sample was mixed with 2g of alumina, 3g of silica gel and 1g of sodium sulfate (anhydrous).
(2) The mixture was packed in a glass tube of 1.3cm in diameter tightly, followed by the addition of 5g of silica gel on the top of sample mixture.
(3) The column thus prepared was subjected to partition chromatography of ascending method using the mixture of toluene, ethyl acetate and ethanol (2: 2: 1) as a solvent.
(4) After development, the FF band of yellow colored portion in the column was taken out to elute with methanol.
(5) FF in the eluate was determined colorimetrically according to the method by Kanno et al.