Determination of edible bird's nests by FTIR and SDS-PAGE coupled with multivariate analysis

Abstract

Edible bird's nests (EBNs) have been traditionally regarded as a kind of medicinal and healthy food in China. Nowadays, EBNs in market are graded by some conventional features presented by EBN products, such as material purity, geographical origin, production environment or color. Since different EBNs have various prices, two common types of fraud with EBN, namely substituting the EBN ingredient with cheap non-EBN materials and mislabeling of a country of origin or production environment, have occurred for a long time. To explore a feasible method for identifying EBNs, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) system and sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) combined with multivariate analysis were employed. The results showed that FTIR could discriminate between authentic and fake EBNs since there were big differences in spectra of these samples. On the other hand, protein band data obtained by SDS-PAGE could be used for distinctly identifying geographical origin of house nests and the production environment of EBNs. It is concluded that FTIR in combination with SDS-PAGE is a promising method for comprehensive determination of EBNs.