Rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry for high-throughput screening in food analysis: The case of boar taint

Boar taint is a contemporary off-odor present in meat of uncastrated male pigs. As European Member States intend to abandon surgical castration of pigs by 2018, this off-odor has gained a lot of research interest. In this study, rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS) was explored for the rapid detection of boar taint in neck fat. Untargeted screening of samples (n=150) enabled discrimination between sow, tainted and untainted boars. The obtained OPLS-DA models showed excellent classification accuracy, i.e. 99% and 100% for sow and boar samples or solely boar samples, respectively. Furthermore, the obtained models demonstrated excellent validation characteristics (R2(Y)=0.872-0.969; Q2(Y)=0.756-0.917), which were confirmed by CV-ANOVA (p<0.001) and permutation testing. In conclusion, in this work for the first time highly accurate and high-throughput (<10s) classification of tainted and untainted boar samples was achieved, rendering REIMS a promising technique for predictive modelling in food safety and quality applications.