Applications of electronic tongue system for quantification of safranal concentration in saffron ( Crocus sativus L.)

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ORIGINAL PAPER

Applications of electronic tongue system for quantification of safranal concentration in saffron (Crocus sativus L.) Shekoufeh Yousefi‑Nejad1 · Kobra Heidarbeigi1   · Mahmoud Roushani2 Received: 6 June 2020 / Accepted: 23 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract In the present research the electronic tongue system was proposed consisted of an array of 4 voltammetric sensors to discriminate saffron samples based on the safranal concentration. Different samples were provided by blending saffron samples with distilled water and pure safranal with ethanol. The provided signals by the electronic tongue system were analyzed using the PCA and ANN methods. The total variance among safranal concentrations by PCA method were 90% and 100% in pure safranal and saffron samples, respectively. Also, it was revealed that the electronic tongue could provide good prediction for safranal concentration in saffron as 98.81% accuracy by means of optimized ANN model. Results showed that there are some relationships between HPLC and electronic tongue signals to determine safranal concentration levels in different saffron samples. Keywords  Saffron · Safranal concentration · Electronic tongue · Principal component analysis · Artificial neural network

Introduction Saffron is the red-dried stigma of Crocus sativus L. plant, the Iridaceae family, and the most expensive plant in the world [21]. Due to the color, odor, and compounds, it has many food and pharmaceutical utilities. About 5 kg of wet saffron can be produced from one to two hundred thousand saffron flowers, which this amount decreased to one kg after drying [14, 24]. Iran by 90% of 220 tonnes of global saffron production in the world has the first rank in terms of cultivation and production of saffron and Spain is ranked as the second producer [13]. Saffron has important compounds (safranal, crocin and picrocrocin) so that, the higher the amount of these compounds, the higher the saffron quality. The aroma and bitter taste of saffron is due to the presence of the safranal compound [12, 15]. Quality evaluation often involves measuring some properties such as appearance, smell, texture, and taste that are

* Kobra Heidarbeigi [email protected] 1



Mechanical Engineering of Biosystems Department, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran



Department of Chemistry, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran

2

frequently tested by human inspectors which is destructive, so that the specimens cannot be used after tests and analysis [9]. Therefore, the industry needs automated systems to improve the speed and accuracy of production and to assess the quality components of the products. The used common methods to identify the saffron compounds and its grading are analytical technologies such as NIR [27], GC–Ms [4, 10], HPLC [2, 5] and UV–Vis methods [23]. The disadvantages of these methods are the relatively high costs, time consumer analysis and the need to sufficient knowledge to carry out the experiments and operating of the mentioned sy