Honey Evaluation Using Electronic Tongues: An Overview

Ana Veloso,António Peres,Leticia Estevinho,Luís Dias,Mara Sousa

doi:10.3390/chemosensors6030028

Abstract

Honey-rich composition in biologically active compounds makes honey a food products highly appreciated due to the nutritional and healthy properties. Food-manufacturing is very prone to different types of adulterations and fraudulent labelling making it urgent to establish accurate, fast and cost-effective analytical techniques for honey assessment. In addition to the classical techniques (e.g., physicochemical analysis, microscopy, chromatography, immunoassay, DNA metabarcoding, spectroscopy), electrochemical based-sensor devices have arisen as reliable and green techniques for food analysis including honey evaluation, allowing in-situ and on-line assessment, being a user-friendly procedure not requiring high technical expertise. In this work, the use of electronic tongues, also known as taste sensor devices, for honey authenticity and assessment is reviewed. Also, the versatility of electronic tongues to qualitative (e.g., botanical and/or geographical origin assessment as well as detection of adulteration) and quantitative (e.g., assessment of adulterants levels, determination of flavonoids levels or antibiotics and insecticides residues, flavonoids) honey analysis is shown. The review is mainly focused on the research outputs reported during the last decade aiming to demonstrate the potentialities of potentiometric and voltammetric multi-sensor devices, pointing out their main advantages and present and future challenges for becoming a practical quality analytical tool at industrial and commercial levels.

Highlights

Honey is a natural sweet substance consisting of floral extracts and bee secretions, derived from pollen and nectar and produced by several species of bees [1]
Honey has been used to prevent, and treat patients with, oral mucositis resulting from radio/chemotherapy [5,6], to reduce esophagitis induced by chemoradiation therapy during the treatment of lung cancer [7], to treat skin ulcer [8,9] and to treat acute irritating cough [10]
Several research works reported the development and application of E-tongues based on different electrochemical techniques as well as hybrid E-tongues, which are systems that merge different techniques by applying data fusion approaches with different abstraction levels

Summary

Introduction

Honey is a natural sweet substance consisting of floral extracts and bee secretions, derived from pollen and nectar and produced by several species of bees [1]. The majority of the analytical techniques reported for honey analysis (e.g., physicochemical characterization, biological and therapeutic activities evaluation) or, the detection of adulterations (e.g., dilution of high-value honey with water, the addition of high-sugar corn syrups or sugar-based adulterants, as well as the filtration of low-value honey to remove its source pollen and spiked with pollen from the ‘desired’ high-value honey), are usually time-consuming, destructive and expensive techniques, hardly applied in-situ and on-line, being far away from the economic possibilities and technical skills available at the majority of the small and medium bee-keeping industries The acknowledgement of this fact has recently attracted attention of the scientific research community, which are developing, building and testing fast, low-cost and user-friendly techniques such as electrochemical sensor devices for honey analysis, which require minimum sample pre-treatment steps and that may be miniaturized allowing their practical in-situ application.

Electrochemical Sensor Devices for Honey Evaluation

Voltammetric Electronic Tongues

Findings

Conclusions