Insights of ion mobility spectrometry and its application on food safety and authenticity: A review

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is gaining importance in the field of food safety and authenticity in recent years due to its main potential to overcome the challenges that arise from the complexity of food matrices. For many years, IMS has been used as a stand-alone analytical detector due to its quick response, high sensitivity, and portability, and stand-alone applications in food analysis have been explored in recent years. At the same time, IMS hyphenation to mass spectrometry (MS) techniques, usually combined with liquid or gas chromatography (LC/GC), provides an additional dimension to separate isobaric compounds and thus improves method selectivity. Besides, with such ion mobility – mass spectrometry (IM−MS) methods, background noise decreases, increasing method sensitivity, and it provides complementary information to mass spectra and retention time with the collision cross section (CCS). The development of CCS databases within the food safety field would even permit the identification of compounds in non-targeted approaches. Furthermore, it would increase the confidence of control laboratories when determining a sample as non-compliant. Therefore, the number of applications by IMS on food safety and authenticity has increased remarkably in recent years. This review provides the general insights of IMS with the current state and recent approaches for its performance improvement and a general outlook of its applicability in food safety and authenticity.