In this publication (open access) the authors used a chemometric approach to identify pork adulteration in cooked beef mince from GC-MS of the volatile flavour compounds.
They sourced pork and beef directly from an abattoir and then prepared cooked mince in the laboratory. A total of four different groups of samples were made, two of them were pure (only beef & only pork) and two were adulterated. The adulterated mixed samples were prepared in two different ratios (80% beef and 20% pork; 60% beef and 40% pork). Each sample was pan roasted under standardised and controlled cooking conditions. The study utilized a total of 20 distinct animals
Volatile compounds were extracted and analyzed using headspace-solid-phase-microextraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (SPME-GC-MS). Adulterated meat samples were effectively identified through principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). Through variable importance in projection scores and a Random Forest test, 11 key compounds, including nonanal, octanal, hexadecanal, benzaldehyde, 1-octanol, hexanoic acid, heptanoic acid, octanoic acid, and 2-acetylpyrrole for beef, and hexanal and 1-octen-3-ol for pork, were robustly identified as biomarkers. These compounds exhibited a discernible trend in adulterated samples based on adulteration ratios, evident in a heatmap. Lipid degradation compounds strongly influenced meat discrimination. PCA and PLS-DA yielded significant sample separation, with the first two components capturing 80% and 72.1% of total variance, respectively.
The authors conclude that this technique could be a reliable method for detecting meat adulteration in cooked meat.
Photo by Andrew Valdivia on Unsplash
Comments