Fast Classification of Geographical Origins of Honey Based on Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy and Multivariate Analysis.

Zhangfeng Zhao,Minghua Sun,Jiyu Peng,Fei Liu,Lun Chen,Fei Zhou

doi:10.3390/s20071878

Abstract

Traceability of honey is highly required by consumers and food administration with the consideration of food safety and quality. In this study, a technique named laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) was used to fast trace geographical origins of acacia honey and multi-floral honey. LIBS emissions from elements of Mg, Ca, Na, and K had significant differences among different geographical origins. The clusters of honey from different geographical origins were visualized with principal component analysis. In addition, support vector machine (SVM) and linear discrimination analysis (LDA) were used to quantitively classify the origins. The results indicated that SVM performed better than LDA, and the discriminant results of multi-floral honey were better than acacia honey. The accuracy and mean average precision for multi-floral honey were 99.7% and 99.7%, respectively. This study provided a fast approach for geographical origin classification, and might be helpful for food traceability.

Highlights

Honey is a natural sweet product produced by bees from the nectar of flowers [1], which mainly consists of carbohydrates, water, proteins, minerals, amino acids, phenols, and vitamins, etc
Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy was successfully used to discriminate the geographical origins of honey
One-way ANOVA test indicated emissions from Na I 589.00 nm had significant difference among six groups, which might be considered as feature emission for geographical origin discrimination

Summary

Introduction

Honey is a natural sweet product produced by bees from the nectar of flowers [1], which mainly consists of carbohydrates, water, proteins, minerals, amino acids, phenols, and vitamins, etc. Because of its high nutrients and healthy benefits, honey has been considered as an important health product around the world, especially in China. It has been demonstrated that honey can improve immune systems and oral health, prevent side effects linked with cancers treatment, heal wounds, etc. In order to determine the geographical origins of honey, some analytical methods have been proposed by researchers. Chemical analysis methods including high performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry [6], isotope ratio mass spectrometry [7], inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy [8,9,10], and gas chromatography mass spectrometry [9] were used to discriminate the geographical and botanical origins of honey

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion