Discrimination of Herbal Products from Zingiberaceae Family Using Electric Nose Combined with Chemometric Techniques

Abstract

Many herbs from the Zingiberaceae family are widely used as raw materials in herbal products. Some of them have a similar colour for their rhizomes and are quite hard to distinguish from each other, so it is possible to misidentify one for the other. Therefore, it is necessary to find a rapid and reliable method for discrimination of Zingiberaceae-based products. The present work investigates the possibility of applying electric nose (e-nose) combined with chemometric techniques for discrimination of herbal products from the Zingiberaceae family. Nine powdered samples consisting of Alpinia galanga, Alpinia conchigera, Curcuma longa, Curcuma zedoaria, Curcuma xanthorrhiza, Zingiber officinale, Zingiber zerumbet, Kaempferia galangal, and Kaempferia pandurata were analysed by using e-nose. As a result, e-nose identified several volatile compounds for each sample. Next, the responses from e-nose were used for principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant function analysis (DFA) to visualise the dataset using score plots. The result demonstrates that the combination of e-nose and PCA and DFA could discriminate the samples, in which DFA gave clearer discrimination between all samples. This combination can be used for rapid discrimination of Zingiberaceae-based products, which could contribute to the quality control in the herbal industry's supply chain.