Discrimination between cave and House-Farmed Edible Bird's nest based on major mineral profiles

The high priced cave edible bird's nest (ebn) has attracted unscrupulous ebn producers to adulterate ebn with lower priced house-farmed ebn due to the fact that both are almost indistinguishable by visual inspection. in the present study,major mineral contents such as calcium,sodium,magnesium and potassium of both ebn types were analysed using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (icp-oes). three pattern recognition techniques namely hierarchical cluster analysis (hca),principal component analysis (pca) and linear discriminant analysis (lda) were employed to determine the influence of harvesting origins on mineral profiles. with the use of hca and pca,ebn samples have successfully been grouped into two distinct clusters. from the pca score plot,principal component 1 (49.53 %) and principal component 2 (41.11%) accounted for 90.64% of the total variability. in addition,lda presented excellent performance in discriminating and predicting membership of the two ebn sample types with classification rate of 100%. © universiti putra malaysia press.