Determination of volatile organic compound patterns characteristic of five unifloral honey by solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry coupled to chemometrics

BARONI, MARÍA VERÓNICA; NORES, MARÍA LAURA; DÍAZ, MARÍA DEL PILAR; CHIABRANDO, GUSTAVO A.; FASSANO, JUAN PABLO; COSTA, CRISTINA; WUNDERLIN, DANIEL A.

American Chemical Society

Lugar: Washington; Año: 2006 vol. 54 p. 7235 - 7235

e report the evaluation of the floral origin of honey by analysis of its volatile organic compounds (VOCs) profile, joined with the use of combined pattern recognition techniques. Honey samples, from five floral origins, were analyzed by headspace solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatographymass spectrometry, selecting 35 VOCs out of the entire profiles, which were analyzed by hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), stepwise discriminant analysis (SDA), and K-nearest-neighbor (KNN). Both HCA and SDA were used as exploratory tools to select a group of VOCs representing similitude and differences among studied origins. Thus, six out of 35 VOCs were selected, verifying their discriminating power by KNN, which afforded 93% correct classification. Therefore, we drastically reduced the amount of compounds under consideration but kept a good differentiation between floral origins. Selected compounds were identified as octanal, benzeneacetaldehyde, 1-octanol, 2-methoxyphenol, nonanal, and 2-H-