Lecture
Evaluation of innovative ambient mass spectrometry tools for rapid and accurate authetication of the botanical origin of honey
- at -
- ICM Saal 4b
- Type: Lecture
Lecture description
In 2023, the European Union (EU) coordinated action has confirmed that a significant part of the honey placed on the EU market is suspected not to comply with the provi-sions of the EU Honey Directives and remains undetected. In 2024, the EU "Breakfast Directive" requested the strengthening of controls, recommending the innovation and reinforcement of screening methodologies to verify the authenticity of honey that cir-culates in EU. In the quest for a rapid and cost-effective tool to determine the botanical origin of monofloral honey, the analytical capabilities of Coated Blade Spray Mass Spectrometry (CBS-MS) and Dielectric Barrier Discharge Mass Spectrometry (DBDI-MS) were investigated. The aim of this study was to compare the capabilities of both techniques. The chemical profiles of previously authenticated honey samples from seven different botanical origins were captured by both techniques. A SICRIT® source (Plasmion) coupled to an Exactive Orbitrap (Thermo Fisher) was used for the DBDI-HRMS analysis. The honeys were analyzed by placing twice each open container di-rectly in front of the sampling source for 6 s. For the CBS-MS analysis, one gram of each honey was diluted in a methanol:water (20:80, v/v). The extract was centrifuged and transferred into a 1 mL 96-wellplate. The blades were dipped into the extract su-pernatants with agitation and placed in the CBS source (Restek) coupled to a qtrap (ABSciex) inlet for analysis. An exploratory analysis was performed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to generate a graphical representation of the CBS-MS and DBDI-HRMS data, which allowed the discovery of patterns, outliers or relationships between honey types in an unsupervised manner. In addition, the performances of different classification algorithms were constructed and compared. Finally, to deter-mine the molecular identities of the ions that contribute most to the classification, the most significant features were annotated by LC-MS/MS. It is shown that DBDI-HRMS and CBS-MS revealed different molecular features that uniquely characterize the floral sources of the seven monofloral honey types we studied. Both techniques achieved excellent performances in terms of accuracy, area under the curve, sensitivity and specificity and can be considered as reliable screening methods to determine the bo-tanical origin of honey. However, it should be noted that the DBDI-HRMS method can rapidly interrogate the samples, capturing the important and distinctive compounds in the aroma of honeys within 6 s, thus saving time and resources and allowing more efficient use of laboratory equipment. Careful late-stage validation of both ambient mass spectrometry methods, including checks is mandatory to move these methods into industrial quality controls.
