Tracing the geographical origin of Argentinean lemon juices based on trace element profiles using advanced chemometric techniques

GAIAD, JOSE EMILIO; MARCHEVSKY, EDUARDO JORGE; HIDALGO, MELISA JAZMIN; VILLAFAÑE, ROXANA; PELLERANO, ROBERTO GERARDO

MICROCHEMICAL JOURNAL

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016 vol. 129 p. 243 - 248

0026-265X

This study examines the application of chemometric techniques associatedwith trace element concentrations fororigin evaluation of lemon juice samples. Seventy-four lemon juice samples from three different provinces ofArgentina were evaluated according to their microelement contents to identify differences in patterns of elementsin the three provinces. Inductively coupled plasmamass spectrometry (ICP-MS)was used for the determinationof twenty-five elements (Ag, Al, As, Ba, Bi, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Ga, In, La, Li,Mn, Mo, Ni, Rb, Sb, Sc, Se, Sn, Sr, Tl, V,and Zn). Once the analytical data were collected, supervised pattern recognition techniqueswere applied to constructclassification/discrimination rules to predict the origin of samples on the basis of their profiles of trace elements.Namely, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), knearestneighbors (k-NN), random forest (RF), and support vector machine with radial basis function Kernel(SVM). The results indicated that itwas feasible to attribute unknown lemon juice samples to its geographical origin.SVMhad better performance compared to RF, k-NN, LDA and PLS-DA, listed in descending order. Eventually,this study verifies that trace element pattern is a powerful geographical indicator when identifying the origin oflemon juice samples by analyzing trace element data with the help of SVMtechnique. This level of accuracy providesan interesting foundation to propose the combination of trace element contents with SVM technique as avaluable tool to evaluate the geographical origin of lemon juice samples produced in Argentina.