Differentiation of Insect Flours by Elemental Analysis and Chemometrics: A Study Using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS)

Differentiation of Insect Flours by Elemental Analysis and Chemometrics: A Study Using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS)

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Background: This study aimed to validate a method for characterizing and quantifying the multi-elemental profiles of different insect flours to enable their distinction, identification, and quality assessment.The focus was on three insect simply boho classroom species: cricket (Acheta domesticus), buffalo worm (Alphitobius diaperinus), and mealworm (Tenebrio molitor).Methods: Mealworms were powdered in the laboratory through mechanical processing.

Sample analysis involved acid digestion using a microwave digester, followed by profiling with Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS).This technique enabled rapid, multi-elemental analysis at trace levels.Chemometric methods, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for exploratory analysis, Covariance Selection-Linear Discriminant Analysis (CovSel-LDA), alongside forward stepwise LDA classification methods, were applied and compared.

Results: ICP-MS accurately detected elements at micro trace levels.Both classification models, based on different variable selection methods and externally validated on a test set comprising 45% of the available samples, proved effective in classifying samples based on slightly different pools of trace elements.CovSel-LDA selected Mg and Se, whereas the stepwise-LDA focused on Mg, K, and Mn.

Conclusions: the validated methods demonstrated high caruso rhodiola accuracy and generalizability, supporting their potential use in food industry applications.This model could assist in quality control, facilitating the introduction of insect-based flour into European and international markets as novel foods.