Innovative non-targeted liquid chromatography fingerprinting approach for authenticating tigernuts under Protected Designation of Origin quality seal Medina García, Miriam Jiménez Carvelo, Ana María Bagur González, María Gracia González Casado, Antonio Tigernuts Food fraud Chemometrics Fingerprinting Chromatography The authors are deeply grateful to the ‘Valencia’ PDO Manage- ment Body for providing the samples for this study. In addition, AMJC acknowledges the grant (RYC2021-031993-I) funded by MCIN/AEI/501100011033 and ‘European Union NextGeneration EU/PRTR’. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Gra- nada / CBUA. BACKGROUND: Tigernut is a typical foodstuff from a specific region of Valencia (Spain) called ‘L'Horta Nord’, where it is com- mercialized under a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) as Chufa de Valencia (‘Valencia's tigernut’). PDO-recognized tiger- nuts present unique characteristics associated with their particular production region. Increasing demand and the associated expansion of its cultivation area has made necessary an exhaustive quality control to check the geographical origin and quality seal. RESULTS: In this work, a new multivariate analytical method capable of authenticating the PDO quality seal of tigernut samples was developed. Tigernut fat fraction was extracted under optimal conditions, applying the methodology of design of experi- ments. The analytical method combined fingerprinting methodology and chemometric tools to observe the natural grouping of samples using the exploratory analysis method and to develop classification models (partial least squares–discriminatory analysis; PLS-DA) to discriminate between two sample categories: (i) PDO tigernuts; and (ii) NON-PDO tigernuts. CONCLUSION: The built PLS-DA model demonstrated 100% accuracy, high sensitivity and specificity, revealing that the tigernut fat fraction can be applied to authenticate the PDO quality seal. 2023-11-13T10:25:11Z 2023-11-13T10:25:11Z 2023-10-18 journal article M Medina-García et al. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture/ Early View. [https://doi.org/10.1002/jsfa.13054] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/85614 10.1002/jsfa.13054 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Wiley