Elsevier

Food Chemistry

Volume 239, 15 January 2018, Pages 760-770
Food Chemistry

Metabolomics for organic food authentication: Results from a long-term field study in carrots

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2017.06.161Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • The agricultural origin of carrots could be predicted.

  • Using yearly harvested samples allowed 100% correct classification of unknowns.

  • Metabolomic fingerprinting showed potential for organic food authentication.

Abstract

Increasing demand for organic products and their premium prices make them an attractive target for fraudulent malpractices. In this study, a large-scale comparative metabolomics approach was applied to investigate the effect of the agronomic production system on the metabolite composition of carrots and to build statistical models for prediction purposes. Orthogonal projections to latent structures-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) was applied successfully to predict the origin of the agricultural system of the harvested carrots on the basis of features determined by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry. When the training set used to build the OPLS-DA models contained samples representative of each harvest year, the models were able to classify unknown samples correctly (100% correct classification). If a harvest year was left out of the training sets and used for predictions, the correct classification rates achieved ranged from 76% to 100%. The results therefore highlight the potential of metabolomic fingerprinting for organic food authentication purposes.

Keywords

Carrots
Metabolomics
Authenticity
Conventional agriculture
Organic agriculture
Mass spectrometry
Chemometrics

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