RESUMEN

Chili peppers are widely utilized in the world as savory food additives due the pungency induced by the capsaicinoids. Also, these compounds have functional properties as antimutagenic, antitumoral, antioxidant and analgesic. These characteristics increase the interest in this compound class, hence the capsaicinoid analysis must be reproducible and accurate. This study aimed to develop and validate a fast, efficient and reproducible method to analyze capsaicinoids in Brazilian Capsicum chinense fruits. The extracts were obtained after an optimization step that indicated the condition 100% of methanol and 10min on ultrasound assisted extraction. The analyses were carried out in an ultra high performance liquid chromatographic system with detection by a photo diode array and mass spectrometer. The analytical method developed permits the separation of 8 capsaicinoids in 4min of time analysis expending only 2mL of solvent as mobile phase. The validation parameters evaluated for the method show the effectiveness and satisfactory performance to answer the analytical needs of this research area, presenting low values to relative standard deviation in repeatability and reproducibility and recoveries ranged from 88 to 112% for capsaicin and 89 to 109% for dihydrocapsaicin. In the extracts from different accessions of C. chinense fruits analyzed, the contents of capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin were in the range of 156-1442µgg-1 and 26-478µgg-1 of fresh fruit, respectively, showing the large application of this method for quantification of the two major capsaicinoids in fast routine analysis and may be used to determine the concentrations of other minor capsaicinoids once appropriate standards are available.