oregano authenticity (2)

 

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Herbs and spices are one of the food commodities most susceptible to adulteration and fraud. In this study, 5 fingerprinting techniques - Near Infrared (NIR), Mid-Infrared (MIR), Hyper Spectral Imaging (HSI), Gas Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (GC–MS), and Proton-transfer Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass spectrometry (PTR-TOF-MS), combined with chemometrics, are examined to evaluate their potential to authenticate oregano. In total, 102 oregano samples from one harvest season were analysed for origin and variety assessment, 159 samples for adulteration assessment, and 72 samples for batch-to-batch control. Different chemometric models were applied for adulteration, origin and variety assessment. The best results were for origin assessment, which gave prediction rates of more than 89%. A level of 10% adulteration of oregano with myrtle, sumac, olive and cistus could be detected using HSI, NIR and PTR-TOF-MS.

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Food commodities and ingredients that are expensive and are part of complex supply chains are particularly vulnerable. Both herbs and spices fit these criteria perfectly and yet strategies to detect fraudulent adulteration are still far from robust. An FT-IR screening method coupled to data analysis using chemometrics, and a second method using LC-HRMS were developed with the latter detecting commonly used adulterants by biomarker identification. The two tier testing strategy was applied to 78 samples obtained from a variety of retail and on-line sources. There was 100% agreement between the two tests that over 24% of all samples tested had some form of adulterants present. The innovative strategy devised could potentially be used for testing the global supply chains for fraud in many different forms of herbs.

Read the full article at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030881461630680X

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