Quantification and classification of fatty acids in marine fish oil from Southeast Sulawesi using gas chromatography and chemometrics

Marine fish oils contain various fatty acids (FAs) which are important for human health. Due to the variation of species and origins, the FA compositions were truly affected. This research aimed to quantify FAs of fish oils from various Epinephelus sp. and Lutjanus sp. obtained from different locations around Southeast Sulawesi coast Indonesia using gas chromatography with flame ionization detector and to create classification models using chemometrics techniques. Different locations affected the amounts of FAs from each type of fish oil. The FA composition of fish oil consisted of 45-61 saturated FAs, 19.16-39.30 monosaturated FAs, and 11.51-30.20 polyunsaturated FAs. Supervised pattern recognition chemometrics such as partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), sparse PLS-DA, and orthogonal PLS-DA could be used for the classification of fish oils extracted from Epinephelus sp. and Lutjanus sp. FAs of tricosanoate (C23:0), trans-9-elaidate (C18:1t), linolelaidate (C18:2t), cis-11,14,17-eicosatrienoate (C20:3), palmitate (C16:0), stearate (C18:0), cis-9 oleate (C18:1), and myristate (C14:0) were considered for their significant contributions in discriminating Epinephelus fish oils and Lutjanus fish oils (variable importance in projection score > 1). Heatmap analysis showed that the distribution of each FA in all fish oil samples. This study could be very useful for the authentication and quality control of fish oils based on their FA compositions and classification analysis using chemometrics. © 2024 Irnawati Irnawati et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). All Rights Reserved.