Determination of Chinese Angelica honey adulterated with rice syrup by an electrochemical sensor and chemometrics

Abstract

A facile electrochemical sensor strategy coupled with a chemometric method was developed to analyze Chinese Angelica honey samples adulterated with rice syrup based on the decrease of natural antioxidants in the honey. The cyclic voltammogram of the honey sample changed obviously when it was blended with an amount of rice syrup. Then twelve variable features were extracted from the electrochemical signals in cyclic voltammetry unprecedentedly. The variables representing current and quantity of electricity played an important role in discriminate analysis after being processed by principal component analysis (PCA). Principal component analysis linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) and LDA models showed good performance in identifying pure honey and adulterated honey with the recognition rates both achieving 100%. Finally, in quantitative analysis of honey adulteration, the multiple linear regression (MLR) model fitted exactly and predicted well with R_c = 0.921 and R_p = 0.898 at twelve principal components (PCs), showing its superiority over other algorithms in this work. The overall results demonstrate that an electrochemical sensor combined with chemometrics has significant potential in the analysis of honey adulteration and other food products.