S. Pratsmoya et al., INDUCTIVELY-COUPLED PLASMA APPLICATION FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF 19 ALMOND CULTIVARS USING INORGANIC ELEMENT COMPOSITION, Journal of agricultural and food chemistry, 45(6), 1997, pp. 2093-2097
Ten inorganic elements (Ca, Cu, Fe, S, K, P, Na, Mn, Mg, and Zn) have
been determined in the kernel of 19 almond cultivars grown in the same
field and year, but from different origins, by means of inductively c
oupled plasma (ICP) after a microwave digestion of the samples. Statis
tical methods have been applied to a batch of 171 samples to find rela
tions among the cultivars. The F ratios obtained by applying ANOVA ana
lysis are all significant, indicating that a classification of the cul
tivars using these variables is reasonable to pursue. The cluster anal
ysis and the principal component analysis can distinguish the American
cultivars Non Pareil, Wawona, and Texas from the remainder of almonds
, most of them from the Mediterranean area, while the Titan cultivar,
also an American one, shows a great similarity to Atocha, a Spanish al
mond. Further, linear discriminant analysis is used to identify the in
organic elements that contribute to a higher degree to find difference
s between the hypothesized groups of almonds obtained from a principal
component analysis and cluster analysis.