Statistical Analysis of Mineral Concentration for the Geographic Identification of Garlic Samples from Sicily (Italy), Tunisia and Spain

Abstract

We performed a statistical analysis of the concentration of mineral elements, by means of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), in different varieties of garlic from Spain, Tunisia, and Italy. Nubia Red Garlic (Sicily) is one of the most known Italian varieties that belongs to traditional Italian food products (P.A.T.) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry. The obtained results suggest that the concentrations of the considered elements may serve as geographical indicators for the discrimination of the origin of the different samples. In particular, we found a relatively high content of Selenium in the garlic variety known as Nubia red garlic, and, indeed, it could be used as an anticarcinogenic agent.

Nutritional Value, Chemical Characterization and Bulb Morphology of Greek Garlic Landraces

“…Apart from the differences between the genotypes from different growing areas, there were also differences between the ecotypes from the same region. According to Vadalà et al [25] mineral composition of garlic bulbs could be used as a means for origin discrimination between samples of different growing areas in Spain, Tunisia and Italy. Hacıseferoğulları et al [24] and Akinwande and Olatunde [26] have also reported significant amounts of K in garlic bulbs, while Mg, Na and Ca were also detected in considerable amounts.…”

Traceability of Opuntia ficus‐indica L. Miller by ICP‐MS multi‐element profile and chemometric approach

“…18,19 The identification of geographic provenience of food represents, first, a current and global issue for consumers, who show increasing interest in the traceability of food supply, and, second, an important quality parameter to bring about the protected denomination of origin for some foods. 20 Several techniques are applied to the study of food quality and traceability, such as foodomic methods, chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques, among others, [21][22][23][24][25] but multi-elemental analysis (MEA) is the most commonly used. 26 MEA, in fact, represents an effective analytical approach to individuate the geographical origin of food products but also to analyze some different environmental and geological features, such as soil type, pH, porosity, humidity, rainfall and temperature, able to influence the element profile and provide the greatest discriminating power.…”

Multiangle discrimination of geographical origin of rice based on analysis of mineral elements and characteristic volatile components

“…The PCA was to use a few indicators to replace and reflect more original information (Mottese et al, 2017). LDA is based on some indicators observed to classify the object, and the discriminant function developed is employed to classify the unknown samples (Vadala et al, 2016). LDA process: all samples were divided into calibration set and validation set.…”