The application of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography to the analysis of wildfire debris for ignitable liquid residue

Interpol review of fire debris analysis and fire investigation 2019–2022

“…Kates et al applied GC x GC with time-of-flight (TOF) MS to the analysis of fire debris samples taken from wildfires [ 44 ]. The authors found that using GC x GC-TOFMS allowed for better separation of ignitable liquids from interfering compounds in the matrices, due to lower detection limits.…”

30th Anniversary of comprehensive two‐dimensional gas chromatography: Latest advances

“…82 The separation power of GC×GC-FID was demonstrated particularly valuable to profile fresh and weathered ignitable liquids 83 and, when coupled to MS, to identify traces of ignitable liquids in complex wildfire debris. 84 Increased identification confidence of arson was obtained thanks to the separation in the 2D space of natural interferences, such as pinene, camphene, and verbene, and characteristic ignitable liquids compounds (n-propylbenzene, 3-ethyltoluene, 4-ethyltoluene, 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene, and 2-ethyltoluene).…”

Recent forensic applications of enhanced chromatographic separation methods

“…Regarding arson wildfires, Kates and co-workers [15] focused on the use of comprehensive 2D-GC-TOF-MS to separate compounds naturally occurring in the environment from compounds found in ignitable liquid residues. The second dimension which separates compounds based on polarity was better able to separate compounds released from natural matrices (wood, soil, bark).…”

“…In addition, enhanced separation methods in liquid chromatography and enhanced separation methods in supercritical fluid chromatography applicable to the forensic discipline from 2015 to 2020 will be reviewed. The applications discussed include arson investigations [13][14][15][16], environmental forensics [17,18], sexual assault investigations [19], toxicology [6,11,[20][21][22], and illicit drug analysis [5,7,8,21,[23][24][25][26][27][28].…”