Abstract
Food product safety and quality are closely related to the elemental composition of food. This study combined multielement analysis and chemometric tools to characterize 237 extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) samples from 15 regions of Italy, and to verify the possibility of discriminating them according to different quality factors, such as varietal or geographical origin or whether they were organically or traditionally produced. Some elements have antioxidant properties, while others are toxic to humans or can promote oxidative degradation of EVOO samples. In particular, the antioxidant activity of oils’ hydrophilic fraction was estimated and the concentrations of 45 elements were determined by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). At first, univariate and multivariate analyses of variance were used to compare the element concentrations, and statistically significant differences were found among samples from different regions. Successively, discriminant classification approaches were used to build a model for EVOO authentication, considering, in turn, various possible categorizations. The results have indicated that chemometric methods coupled with ICP-MS have the potential to discriminate and characterize the different types of EVOO, and to provide “typical” elemental fingerprints of the various categories of samples.
Highlights
The elemental composition of foods is of toxicological and nutritional interest and can be considered an important quality parameter (Astolfi et al, 2021a; 2020a; 2020b)
Elements are useful in the characterization of protected designations of origin (PDOs) or protected geographical indications (PGIs) (European Union (EU), 2012), and they can contribute to determine extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) geographical provenance of non-PDO oils (Beltran et al, 2015; Aceto et al, 2019)
The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the most significant relationships between element levels in EVOO and different categorizations, mostly related to the geographical origin using chemometric tools coupled with the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) method
Summary
The elemental composition of foods is of toxicological and nutritional interest and can be considered an important quality parameter (Astolfi et al, 2021a; 2020a; 2020b). The concentrations of trace elements in extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) are one of the criteria for the assessment of the quality regarding storable period and freshness (Choe and Min, 2006). Element determination in EVOO samples has EVOOs Characterization by Chemometrics gained importance for oil geographical traceability and authentication (Cordella et al, 2002; Dugo et al, 2004; Benincasa et al, 2007; Cabrera Vique et al, 2012; Camin et al, 2010; Beltran et al, 2015; Bajoub et al, 2018; Aceto et al, 2019; Damak et al, 2019; Zaroual et al, 2021). Principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) (Gumus et al, 2017; Luka and Akun, 2019; Russo et al, 2020; Savio et al, 2014), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) (Benincasa et al, 2007; CabreraVique et al, 2012; Beltran et al, 2015; Damak et al, 2019), classification trees (CTs) (Gumus et al, 2017), and artificial neural networks (ANNs) (Farmaki et al, 2012; GonzalezFernandez et al, 2019) have been used most
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