Food Authentication: Species and Origin Determination of Truffles (Tuber spp.) by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Chemometrics

The aim of this study was to develop a protocol for the authentication of truffles using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The price of the different truffle species varies significantly, and because the visual differentiation is difficult within the white truffles and within the black truffles, food fraud is likely to occur. Thus, in the context of this work, the elemental profiles of 59 truffle samples of five commercially relevant species were analyzed and the resulting element profiles were evaluated with chemometrics. Classification models targeting the species and the origins were validated using nested cross validation and were able to differentiate the most expensive Tuber magnatum from any other examined truffle. For the black truffles, an overall classification accuracy of 90.4% was achieved, and, most importantly, a falsification of the expensive Tuber melanosporum by Tuber indicum could be ruled out. With regard to the geographical origin, for Italy and Spain, one-versus-all classification models were calculated each to differentiate truffle samples from any other origins by 75.0 and 86.7%, respectively. The prediction was still possible according to an internal mathematical normalization scheme using only the element ratios instead of the absolute element concentrations. The established authentication protocol was successfully tested with an external sample set of five fresh truffles. Our results show the high potential of the element profile for the parallel species and origin authentication of truffles.