Direct analysis in real time high-resolution mass spectrometry for authenticity assessment of lamb

Abstract

In comparison to more traditional methods of determining food authenticity, such as gas chromatography analysis, the primary advantages of DART-HRMS include its high speed and throughput of analysis. This study used a non-targeted metabolomics method based on real-time high-resolution mass spectrometry combined with chemometric analysis to distinguish lamb samples from four regions. Orthogonal least squares-discriminant analysis revealed a distinct difference between these four lamb regions. The potential markers were chosen based on the variable's importance in projection values, variance, and fold change. A total of 79 markers were identified using the matching chemistry database. These markers differed significantly between lambs in four regions according to heatmap analysis. The linear discriminatory analysis model had an initial classification rate of 100.0% and a cross-validation accuracy of 82.50% on the identified markers. The research demonstrates that DART-HRMS can perform a rapid authentication evaluation of lamb samples.

Keywords: DART–TOFMS; Food authentication; Lamb; Metabolomic fingerprinting; Multivariate analysis; Untargeted method.