Geographical origin traceability of laver based on rare earth element fingerprints

Objective: Rare earth element( REE) fingerprints were studied to identify geographical regions of laver.Methods: 36 samples of laver were selected from two different origins of China,Jiangsu and Fujian. Inductively coupled plasma- mass spectrometry( ICP- MS) was applied to determine the contents of 16 rare earth elements in laver.Cluster analysis( CA),principal component analysis( PCA) and fisher linear discriminant analysis( FLD) were applied to differentiate the laver geographical origin.Results: The results of Q- type cluster analysis showed that 36 samples could be clustered reasonably into five groups.Two principal components which accounted for over 97%of the total variance were extracted from the standardized data. The CA and PCA were the effective methods for rare earth elements analysis of laver samples.By cross validation,FLD correctly classified 100.00% of laver samples from 6 regions respectively.Conclusion: Therefore,it is possible to identify geographical regions of laver based on rare earth element fingerprints and multiple statistical analysis.