Abstract

The influence of organic and conventional farming practices on the content of single nutrients in plants is disputed in the scientific literature. Here, large-scale untargeted LC-MS-based metabolomics was used to compare the composition of white cabbage from organic and conventional agriculture, measuring 1,600 compounds. Cabbage was sampled in 2 years from one conventional and two organic farming systems in a rigidly controlled long-term field trial in Denmark. Using Orthogonal Projection to Latent Structures-Discriminant Analysis (OPLS-DA), we found that the production system leaves a significant (p = 0.013) imprint in the white cabbage metabolome that is retained between production years. We externally validated this finding by predicting the production system of samples from one year using a classification model built on samples from the other year, with a correct classification in 83 % of cases. Thus, it was concluded that the investigated conventional and organic management practices have a systematic impact on the metabolome of white cabbage. This emphasizes the potential of untargeted metabolomics for authenticity testing of organic plant products.

Keywords

Conventional agriculture; Long-termfield trial; Metabolomics; Organic agriculture; White cabbage

Published in

Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry
2014, Volume: 406, number: 12, pages: 2885-2897
Publisher: SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

SLU Authors

• Olsson, Marie

  • Horticulture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-014-7704-0

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/117931