NMR based metabolomic approach for evaluation of Vietnamese honey

Abstract

Honey represents a natural, agricultural product endowed with valuable nutritional and pharmacological functions. Therefore, the classification and evaluation of honey has always been a challenge for chemical analysis, especially when honey adulteration is increasing. The traditional methods for quality control of honey is currently based on physicochemical methods, which is often relatively high cost and time-consuming. NMR based metabolomics is a metabolomic fingerprinting approach for NMR data using chemometric tools. This combined approach can be apply in food analysis for origin discrimination, biomarker discovery and authenticity screening. The present study demonstrated the capability of the 1H NMR based metabolomics for evaluation of 27 NMR spectra of 09 selected honey samples from Viet Nam. 1H NMR analysis was conducted immediately on collected honey samples, without extraction. Unsupervised PCA multivariate data analysis, applied on 1H NMR experimental data, used to characterize and classify honey samples according to their origin and quality. Different metabolites specific for each botanical origins of honey samples also determined. The obtained results of the demonstration suggests that this combined approach could be useful to develop generally applicable metabolomic approaches to valuate honey products as well as other agricultural products.