Voltammetric fingerprinting of oils and its combination with chemometrics for the detection of extra virgin olive oil adulteration.

In the present work, two approaches for the voltammetric fingerprinting of oils and their combination with chemometrics were investigated in order to detect the adulteration of extra virgin olive oil with olive pomace oil as well as the most common seed oils, namely sunflower, soybean and corn oil. In particular, cyclic voltammograms of diluted extra virgin olive oils, regular (pure) olive oils (blends of refined olive oils with virgin olive oils), olive pomace oils and seed oils in presence of dichloromethane and 0.1 M of LiClO4 in EtOH as electrolyte were recorded at a glassy carbon working electrode. Cyclic voltammetry was also employed in methanolic extracts of olive and seed oils. Datapoints of cyclic voltammograms were exported and submitted to Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Partial Least Square- Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) and soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA). In diluted oils, PLS-DA provided a clear discrimination between olive oils (extra virgin and regular) and olive pomace/seed oils, while SIMCA showed a clear discrimination of extra virgin olive oil in regard to all other samples. Using methanolic extracts and considering datapoints recorded between 0.6 and 1.3 V, PLS-DA provided more information, resulting in three clusters-extra virgin olive oils, regular olive oils and seed/olive pomace oils-while SIMCA showed inferior performance. For the quantification of extra virgin olive oil adulteration with olive pomace oil or seed oils, a model based on Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis was developed. Detection limit of adulteration in olive oil was found to be 2% (v/v) and the linearity range up to 33% (v/v). Validation and applicability of all models was proved using a suitable test set. In the case of PLS, synthetic oil mixtures with 4 known adulteration levels in the range of 4-26% were also employed as a blind test set.