**2. Chromatography and food safety**

Today, our food supply is more diverse and highly processed than ever before. However, to ensure the nutritive value and to improve the food safety several states have disseminated regulations that states the acceptable limit for each components likewise, food additives, food residues and contaminants in food or food products. Consequently, a better and safe food can only be ensured when we have good approach to analyze such food components, contaminants, or chemical contaminants. In past few decades, chromatography has been recognized as one of important tool to identify and quantify food contaminants to ensure food safety. This novel technique allows the separation, purification, and identification from

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**Figure 1.**

*UPLC-MS: An Emerging Novel Technology and Its Application in Food Safety*

a mixture of the components for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In current years, a unique technology UPLC-MS has been developed to estimate the food contaminants as well as food components for improving food safety. Therefore to obtain such targets, in 2004 Waters launched a brand of liquid chromatography (LC) called UPLC having a significant advancement in column particle size and column dimension having a small and porous particle (sub

UPLC is a novel technique that offers a new pathway for LC. UPLC enhances the capability of LC in four main areas like increasing speed, sensitivity, resolution and accuracy. UPLC is also known as ultra high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC). In comparison to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), UPLC has been upgraded with column packing materials of less than 2 μm in diameter, which increases the speed, accuracy, resolution and sensitivity. Moreover, particle size used in HPLC, UPLC column ranges from 3 to 5 μm and < 2 respectively as well as mobile phase flow rate in HPLC is usually 3.0 ml/min compared to UPLC flow rate 0.6 ml/min. The basic difference in the principle of UPLC and HPLC is the column packing material, which makes a huge difference over the sensitivity and accuracy of the novel techniques. Apart from the principle involved in the LC, there is not much change in basic principle except the pressure generated or created in the instruments make it a more efficient technology. The development of UPLC techniques has urged the scientists to improve the prevailing instrumentation capability for LC, which has the advantage of improved parting performance and constant pressure. Efficiency of this technique is equivalent to the dimension of the column and inversely proportional to the radius of the atoms. As the name suggest ultra performance or ultra-pressure, UPLC works under very high pressure up to 1000 bars, however for HPLC, pump pressure not go more than 300–400 bars. A schematic diagram of UPLC and its internal diagram are presented here in **Figure 1**. In recent years, UPLC has become an integral part of any food safety laboratories, as it reduces the time of run as well as cost of analysis

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92455*

**3. Ultra performance liquid chromatography**

2 μm) [10, 11].

for any analysis [9, 12, 13].

*Flow diagram of ultra performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.*

*UPLC-MS: An Emerging Novel Technology and Its Application in Food Safety DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92455*

a mixture of the components for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In current years, a unique technology UPLC-MS has been developed to estimate the food contaminants as well as food components for improving food safety. Therefore to obtain such targets, in 2004 Waters launched a brand of liquid chromatography (LC) called UPLC having a significant advancement in column particle size and column dimension having a small and porous particle (sub 2 μm) [10, 11].
