Fatty acids profile contribution for the discrimination of olive oil production year

Olive oil is a highly appreciated food product mainly due to its nutritional and healthy properties. Olive oils (cv. Arbequina) produced during 4 consecutive crop years were evaluated regarding some quality attributes, fatty acids (GC-FID), and tocopherol (HPLC-FLD) compositions, total phenols contents (FolinCiocalteu) and radical scavenging activities (DPPH and ABTS). The results showed that, based on all parameters it was possible to split the olive oil according to the production year, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Also, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LOA) together with the simulated annealing (SA) variable selection meta-heuristic algorithm showed that the contents of C16:0, C16:1, C17:0, C18: 1, C18:2, C18:3, C20:0, C20: 1, SFA and PUFA allowed discriminating the olive oil according to the production year (Figure 2), pointing out that fatty acids composition was greatly affected by the production year. Indeed, a predictive overall mean sensitivity of 99.6% was achieved using a repeated Kfold cross-validation procedure (4 folds x 10 repeats).