Elemental analysis of sea cucumber from five major production sites in China: A chemometric approach

Geographic origin of sea cucumber is topic of interest for both consumers and producers since the prices of sea cucumber vary largely according to their geographic origins. It is currently important that a scientific technique should be developed for determining geographic origin as a mean to detect fraudulent labeling. We have therefore developed a technique to classify the geographic origin of sea cucumber based on elemental analysis combined with the statistical analysis. In this study, a total of 39 elements contents of sea cucumber from five major production regions in China were determined to evaluate their applicability in the origin traceability of sea cucumber. Pattern recognition techniques including principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminate analysis (LDA) were applied to evaluate their performance in terms of classification or predictive ability. Thirty six elements in sea cucumber samples of different regions showed significant differences (p < 0.05), which proved that the elemental composition was an effective tool for distinguishing different origins of sea cucumber. Classification of sea cucumber using PCA did not give satisfactory results. The LDA gave an overall correct classification rate of 94.1% and cross-validation rate of 88.2%. These results demonstrated the usefulness of multi-element fingerprints as indicators for authenticating the geographical origin of sea cucumber in China.