Discrimination of high altitude Indian honey by chemometric approach according to their antioxidant properties and macro minerals

The study was intended to characterize three honeys (acacia, pine honeydew and multifloral) from high altitude Kashmir valley of India according to their macro minerals (K, Ca, Na and P), antioxidant properties and sugar parameters. The result for total phenolic content (22.68-59.84 mg GAE/100 g) and total flavonoid content (6.10-8.12 mg QE/100 g), revealed that honeys from Kashmir valley have high antioxidant activity. Principal component analysis (PCA), explained more than 81% of the variance. Four sugars were identified and quantified by HPLC, which include monosaccharides and disaccharides. Chemometric methods such as principal component analysis and linear discriminate techniques were applied on the data in order to differentiate the honeys. PCA explained more than 81% of the variance with the first two PC variables with minerals and antioxidant properties having highest discriminating power while LDA successfully classified all the unifloral honey samples.