Discriminating between cultivars and treatments of broccoli using mass spectral fingerprinting and analysis of variance-principal component analysis.

Metabolite fingerprints, obtained with direct injection mass spectrometry (MS) with both positive and negative ionization, were used with analysis of variance-principal components analysis (ANOVA-PCA) to discriminate between cultivars and growing treatments of broccoli. The sample set consisted of two cultivars of broccoli, Majestic and Legacy, the first grown with four different levels of Se and the second grown organically and conventionally with two rates of irrigation. Chemical composition differences in the two cultivars and seven treatments produced patterns that were visually and statistically distinguishable using ANOVA-PCA. PCA loadings allowed identification of the molecular and fragment ions that provided the most significant chemical differences. A standardized profiling method for phenolic compounds showed that important discriminating ions were not phenolic compounds. The elution times of the discriminating ions and previous results suggest that they were common sugars and organic acids. ANOVA calculations of the positive and negative ionization MS fingerprints showed that 33% of the variance came from the cultivar, 59% from the growing treatment, and 8% from analytical uncertainty. Although the positive and negative ionization fingerprints differed significantly, there was no difference in the distribution of variance. High variance of individual masses with cultivars or growing treatment was correlated with high PCA loadings. The ANOVA data suggest that only variables with high variance for analytical uncertainty should be deleted. All other variables represent discriminating masses that allow separation of the samples with respect to cultivar and treatment.