The quantitative analysis of semiochemicals

Abstract

Social odours have a major influence on the organization of mammalian societies but our umderstarding of their chemistry has been hampered by shortcomings in analytical techniques which have been borrowed from other fields of odour analysis. The known properties of mammalian odours suggest that an appropriate analytical system would need to be able to deal quantitatively with nanogram components from milligram specimens. The dynamic solvent effect (DSE), a novel sampling system for gas-liquid chromatography which allows the exploitation of the quantitative analytical capacity of capillary columns and the associated detectors, has been developed and tested to this end. The DSE traps gas-borne volatiles on a film of solvent held in dynamic equilibrium between evaporation and capillarity in a porous bed. A theoretical model of the DSE is developed which predicts that whether a compound will be trapped depends on its partition ratio above the solvent film.