Sea cucumber (Stichopus
japonicus) is one of the most luxurious and nutritious
seafoods in Asia. It
is always processed into dried products to prevent autolysis, but
its quality is easily destructed during storage. Herein, an extremely
simplified workflow was established for real-time and in situ quality assessment of dried sea cucumbers (DSCs) during storage
based on the lipid oxidation characteristics using an intelligent
surgical knife (iKnife) coupled with rapid evaporative ionization
mass spectrometry (REIMS). The lipidomic phenotypes of DSCs at different
storage times were acquired successfully, which were then processed
by multivariate statistical analysis. The results showed that the
discrepancy in the characteristic ions in different DSCs was significant
(p < 0.05) with high R
2(Y) and Q
2 values (0.975 and 0.986, respectively).
The receiver operating characteristic curve revealed that the ions
of m/z 739.5, m/z 831.5, m/z 847.6, and m/z 859.6 were the most
specific and characteristic candidate biomarkers for quality assessment
of DSCs during accelerated storage. Finally, this method was validated
to be qualified in precision (RSDintraday ≤ 9.65%
and RSDinterday ≤ 9.36%). In conclusion, the results
showed that the well-established iKnife–REIMS method was high-throughput,
rapid, and reliable in the real-time quality assessment of DSCs.