Adulteration Detection of Edible Bird’s Nests Using Rapid Spectroscopic Techniques Coupled with Multi-Class Discriminant Analysis

Abstract

Edible bird’s nests (EBNs) are vulnerable to adulteration due to their huge demand for traditional medicine and high market price. Presently, there are pressing needs to explore field-deployable rapid screening techniques to detect adulteration of EBNs. The objective of this study is to explore the feasibility of using a handheld near-infrared (VIS/SW-NIR) spectroscopic device for the determination of EBN authenticity against the benchmark performance of a benchtop mid-infrared (MIR) spectrometer. Forty-nine authentic EBNs from the different states in Malaysia and 13 different adulterants (five types) were obtained and used to simulate the adulteration of EBNs at 1, 5 and 10% adulteration by mass (a total of 15 adulterated samples). The VIS/SW-NIR and MIR spectra collated were subsequently processed, modelled and classified using multi-class discriminant analysis. The VIS/SW-NIR results showed 100% correct classification for the collagen and nutrient agar classes in authenticity classification, while for the other classes, the lowest correct classification rate was 96.3%. For MIR analysis, only the karaya gum class had 100% correct classification whilst for the other four classes, the lowest rate of correct classification was at 94.4%. In conclusion, the combination of spectroscopic analysis with chemometrics can be a powerful screening tool to detect EBN adulteration.

Rapid analysis technologies with chemometrics for food authenticity field: A review

“…The chemical components, such as NaCl, phosphates, carrageenan, and maltodextrin, doped in beef samples were characterized by selecting specific infrared bands, with the doping identification rate reaching 91% ( Nunes et al, 2016 ). For the study on bird's nests, MIR identification model correctly classified 100% carrageenan adulteration, followed by the nutrient agar class at 98.2%, gelatine class at 97.3%, and collagen class at 94.4% ( Ng et al, 2022 ).…”

Comparative proteomic analysis of edible bird’s nest from different origins

“…Microscopic identification and morphological identification are often used to determine the authenticity of EBN 14 , but they are weak to distinguish similar EBN products that are cleaned and processed into fragments. Chemical composition analysis technologies, such as ultraviolet chromatography, infrared spectrometry, gas chromatography, protein electrophoresis and content determination of chemical constituents 13 , 15 , 16 , detect the difference of chemical composition to identify the authenticity and purity of EBN, but these methods are unable to provide reliable evidence for the identification of biological source and origin of EBN 17 . Therefore, a more reliable identification method is urgently needed.…”