Exploring the potential of paper-based analytical sensors for tea geographical origin authentication.

Tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze-surname of German origin) is a popular beverage consumed worldwide due to its health benefits. Its quality depends on measuring features that may discriminate teas from distinct provenances. Protected designation of origin (PDO) is therefore a very useful label for tea quality evaluation. In the present work, antioxidant activity profiles obtained from microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (µPADs) were analyzed by chemometrics to determine the tea geographic origin. Based on the existing literature, we constructed a database containing chemical data from 26 samples and evaluated it by principal component analysis (PCA) coupled to linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Antioxidant activity was an effective LDA predictor for sample discrimination accomplishing accuracies from 75 to 82%. Modeling performance was favored by an external validation method. The best classification model was found using the first nine PCs as input variables. Training samples achieved a perfect success rate, while the test ones were predicted with 83% specificity, 100% sensitivity, and 90% overall accuracy. The modeling robustness was verified by integrating AUC (0.943) from ROC curve. The PCA-LDA approach taken here demonstrated that the teas coming from different countries can be correctly authenticated through µPADs, thus contributing to certificate samples PDO. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13197-022-05440-1. © Association of Food Scientists & Technologists (India) 2022.