Heavy Metals and Terpenes

• The Big 4 Heavy Metals: Digestion and analysis by ICP-MS.

Presented By: Stephan Altmaier PhD

The legalization of cannabis in various countries has created a hype around the plant and resulted in the commercialization of cannabis and numerous cannabis containing products in the food & beverage, cosmetics and personal care products market. This development made testing of products for their levels of, e.g., cannabinoids, pesticides or heavy metals necessary in order to prove they are harmless to consumers. This work describes an ICP-MS method for the analysis of various heavy metals in Cannabis sativa plant material. Cannabis is known to accumulate metals in various parts of the plant at differing levels. As a consequence, several protocols for the homogenization of cannabis buds were developed. For comparison, cannabis buds were separated into seeds, stems and leaves and the plant parts were subjected to ICP-MS.

What smells so good? 2 approaches for terpene GC-MS analysis

• Unique headspace SPME extraction and GC-MS analysis
  Presented By: Katherine Stenerson, PhD
  In this session, you will learn about using a quick, inexpensive and easy technique called solid phase microextraction (SPME) to look at terpene profiles of cannabis. We will demonstrate how to assemble an SPME device and do a quick sampling from hemp buds. The device will then be analyzed using GC/MS, which will allow us to make tentative identifications of the terpenes based on their spectra. You will see the benefits SPME has to offer with regards to cost, portability and environmental friendliness when compared to other extraction techniques.
• Liquid-liquid extraction and GC-MS analysis
  Presented By: Rafael Acosta
  In this session, we will discuss an alternate approach to  cannabis related terpenes analyzes via GC/MS in full scan mode using Certified Reference Materials. Tridecane is used as the internal standard as it is not found in the samples and elutes in the middle of the chromatogram. The full scan spectra of the reference standard mix, calibration standards and samples were searched and matched against the NIST GC/MS spectra library. The method can be easily modified and adapted to include additional terpenes of interest and be able to identify and quantitate them with the same approach. A fast, simple and sensitive GC/MS method for overall terpenes analysis will be presented.