Few studies are reported up to now on the application of electronic nose technology to identify the puffer fish.Odor is generally understood to be the overall experience from nasal stimulation selleck products and is principally derived from the human senses of smell (olfaction) [4]. Sensory and instrumental techniques, using panelists and/or gas chromatography (GC), are commonly used to determine the odor of food products [5,6]. However, these measurements are often time-consuming, expensive and sometimes are without any objective value [7]. Also, a human sensory panel may be limited in its ability to detect volatile compounds that are non toxic or not obnoxious.Puffer fish of different species, geographical origin and age contain different volatile compounds that contribute to their specific odors which are contributed to by the meat of the puffer fish.
The electronic nose (E-nose) has been widely used for recognizing odors by way of specific sensors [8,9]. The E-nose has been shown to be effective for determining the ��volatile fingerprint�� of a product based on (for example) levels of CO, NO/NO2, CH4, H2S, etc. as well as volatiles, and is capable of displaying excellent discrimination. The sensor arrays of the E-nose provide an output pattern that represents the combined outputs from the components [10]. The output pattern is given by the selectivity of the various sensors [11]. Although the specificity of each sensor may be low, the combination of a sensor array, each with a different selectivity pattern, provides a large amount of information, thus allowing detection of a very large number of odors [12].
E-noses have been proven to be a useful instrumental technique for the food and drinks industry Brefeldin_A for product discrimination, classification, quality evaluation and control [13,14]. The main advantages of the E-nose are that it is rapid and objective and provides overall information. To prevent adulteration and to maintain the safety aspects of species identification and classification of puffer fish for human consumption, it is necessary to develop rapid, low cost, easy-to-handle and objective methods for their identification.In this paper, an innovative, rapid and objective analytical technique consisting of the E-nose coupled with an olfactory sensory evaluation was used to differentiate the species and objective sensorial evaluation of three species of puffer fish.
For this purpose, E-nose signals were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant factorial analysis (DFA), and the data of the olfactory sensory evaluation was treated Oligomycin A buy by the SPSS 17.0 software.2.?Experimental Section2.1. Materials and Sample PreparationCultured puffer fish including Takifugu obscurus, Takifugu flavidus and Takifugu rubripes were chosen for this study. Fifty-two puffer fishes were purchased from Nengzheng Group Co., Ltd.