Author: Herr Dr. Amoneit
Last saved by: Saritas, Sevim
Company: Hewlett-Packard

Lipid fingerprints: Suitable Tools for the Verification of the Iberian Pig Rearing System?
Alba Tres^1, Juan María Garcia-Casco^2, Erik Aparicio^1, Tais Rodriguez^1, Rafael Codony^1,  Josep Boatella^1 and Francesc Guardiola^1
^1Nutrition and Food Science Department, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain 
^2INIA-Centro de I+D en Cerdo Ibérico – Zafra (Badajoz), Spain

Food products most susceptible to fraud are those with a high economic value. Fraud might occur, intentionally or not, when the characteristics of the food product do not agree with those established in the product label including biological origin, geographical origin or production system, among others. Iberian dry-cured products are highly appreciated by consumers. Different product categories exist depending on the pig final fattening period: bellota (“acorn” - when pigs are reared outdoors in a holm-oak forest eating exclusively acorns, grass and other natural resources); cebo de campo (“free range” – pigs are reared outdoors and mainly fed with compound feed); cebo (“feed” – pigs are reared indoors and receive only compound feed); being the bellota category the most expensive but with sensory properties highly appreciated by the consumers. Analytical techniques suitable to discriminate Iberian pig categories would be very supportive to avoid fraud in the sector, and would help to increase consumer confidence in these products. The aim of this study is to evaluate fatty acid (by GC-FID) and triacylglycerol profiles (by HPLC-RID) as tools to authenticate Iberian pig feeding system. These two analytical techniques have been selected because they are quite common in most analytical laboratories, they are quite easy to perform and not expensive. Previous studies in literature showed that the target analysis of fatty acids or triacylglycerols were not fully reliable for authenticating Iberian pig feeding systems. However, those target analysis only focused in a few markers/compounds, but more information might be included in the rest of analytical signal (i.e. non identified peaks, co-eluting peaks). Here we have combined these raw analytical signals with chemometrics (untargeted fingerprinting approach) aiming at exploiting their full potential as authentication tools. Results from this fingerprinting approach will be compared with those from the targeted analysis.