Geographical discrimination of Allium species (garlic and onion) using 1H NMR spectroscopy with multivariate analysis

Abstract

Garlic and onion are the popular ingredients and spices world wide with their specific flavour. Plants of the Allium produce many chemical compounds related with characteristic taste and flavour. They involved many metabolites such as organic acid, sugar and amino acid. The growth environments of products affect content of constituents. 1H high resolution NMR spectroscopy based on metabolomics provides useful and detailed information of various kinds of samples such as food, plants, materials and even body tissue. Therefore, 1H NMR spectroscopy is widely used to study the metabolic variation because NMR spectra focused on not only major chemical components but also minor ingredients. Multivariate statistical analysis is the technique, which can be used to find the relationship between all factors and responses. It can extract the dominant patterns and useful meaning from complex data matrix. The information from multivariate data is commonly useful in understanding the characteristics of various samples. The 1H NMR and 1H HRMAS spectroscopy combined with multivariate statistical analysis could be used to classify of garlic and onion for the traceability issue even considering origins. In this experiment, considerable differences appeared in region of aromatic and amino acid distinction between Korean and Chinese Allium species.