Virgin olive oil (VOO) is a highly valued vegetable oil often subjected to fraud practices such as adulteration with lower prized oils such as seed oils and refined olive oil. Thus, there is a need to provide rapid tools that allow high-throughput authentication and quality control of VOO as well as other valued oils. Mass spectrometry offers unique features -such as specificity, sensitivity and speed of analysis-that map well against this challenge, either those based on atmospheric pressure ionization methods (ESI and APCI) or those occurring under vacuum conditions such as MALDI for nonvolatile species or headspace sampling-mass spectrometry using electron impact ionization (HS-MS) or chemical ionization (proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) and selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS)) for volatile fraction analysis. In addition, more recent atmospheric pressure methods (Ambient MS) enable direct analysis with minor or even no sample manipulation. The aim of this article is to provide a critical overview on all these methods and their potential use for vegetable oil characterization, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches.

初榨橄榄油（VOO）是一种高价值的植物油，经常遭受欺诈行为的侵害，例如掺入劣质精油（例如种子油和精制橄榄油）的掺假。因此，需要提供允许高通量认证和VOO以及其他有价值的油的质量控制的快速工具。质谱具有独特的功能-如特异性，灵敏度和分析速度-可以很好地应对这一挑战，无论是基于大气压电离方法（ESI和APCI）的特征，还是在诸如非挥发性物质或顶空的MALDI等真空条件下发生的特征使用电子碰撞电离（HS-MS）或化学电离（质子转移反应质谱（PTR-MS）和选定的离子流管质谱（SIFT-MS））进行采样质谱分析，进行挥发性成分分析。另外，最新的大气压方法（Ambient MS）可以进行少量甚至甚至没有样品处理的直接分析。本文的目的是对所有这些方法及其在植物油表征中的潜在用途提供关键性的概述，重点介绍不同方法的优缺点。