The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it has developed a method for detecting melamine and cyanuric acid in infant formula, including the chromatography column SeQuant ZIC- HILIC from Merck KGaA.
The method is a variant of liquid chromatography combined with mass spectrometry. With the use of SeQuant ZIC-HILIC, even minute quantities of melamine and cyanuric acid can be precisely and simultaneously separated and detected. Thus the quality of infant formula can be extensively tested using this method. It offers an advantage over alternative measurement methods, as infant formula contaminated with melamine may also contain other toxic triazine compounds such as cyanuric acid, which - in combination with melamine - may possibly intensify the negative effects of the contaminated food.
The FDA regulates, among other things, the safety of foods. Although this applies only to products manufactured in or imported to the United States, the recommendations of the FDA receive global attention and can be adopted by national authorities.
In 2007, the FDA initiated the development of special measurement methods for detecting melamine and other substances in animal feed, including the use of SeQuant ZIC-HILIC from Merck. The background for this was melamine-contaminated animal feed imported to the United States from China. The method now presented by the FDA has been correspondingly adapted for use also in detecting melamine and other substances in milk powder.
Merck is one of the market leaders in liquid chromatography and has been developing products and technologies for chromatography for more than 100 years. In early 2008, Merck acquired the Swedish company SeQuant, which focuses on the development of silica-gel or polymer-based sorbents for "zwitterionic hydrophilic interaction chromatography" - ZIC-HILIC for short - and ion chromatography.