Recently, the Animial Product Quality and Safety Innovation Team at the Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology for Agro-Products of CAAS applied the soft ionization by chemical reaction in transfer quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SICRIT-QTOF MS) to study on the origin traceability of milk. This study successfully distinguished Hongyuan (HY) yak milk and milk samples from three other origins (Tianjin, Inner Mongolia and Henan), and accurately identified protected geographical indications (PGI) HY yak milk. Relevant results were published in  Food Chemistry.

Figure 1 Research process of authenticity identification of Hongyuan yak milk

The protection of the origin of geographical indication products is one of the focal issues in the field of food authenticity. The current common techniques for recognizing the geographical origin of agro-product have many limitations such as complex pre-processing, time-consuming and solvent-intensive. So it is necessary and urgent to establish a fast and accurate method for assessing the authenticity of PGI dairy products.

In order to increase the efficiency of analyses and ensure the accuracy of authenticity determinations，the researchers used SICRIT-QTOF MS combined with multivariate statistical data analysis to evaluate the authenticity of HY yak milk. Twenty-eight potential markers were identified to distinguish HY and the other three origins, and six compounds were found to be characteristic of PGI product HY Yak Milk. This study demonstrates that SICRIT-QTOF MS can be used as a rapid, easy-to-operate and non-targeted analytical tool for distinguishing PGI dairy products, which provides a potentially valuable method for the geographic origin traceability of dairy products.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32072314).

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2024.138444                                                                                                

By Zhao Yan(zhaoyan01@caas.cn)