A Practical Approach on the Combination of GC-MS and Chemometric Tools to Study Australian Edible Green Ants

Edible insects have been proposed as alternative source of protein as they do not need to use excessive quantities of resources such as arable land or water. As insects have great potential as food ingredients and products, there is still a lack of information and knowledge about their nutritional composition, chemical characteristics and functional properties. This study reports the use of chemometric and pre-processing analytical techniques combined with GC-MS data to elucidate differences or similarities in different anatomical parts of Australia edible green ants used as food ingredients. Loadings derived from the PCA analysis highlighted specific regions in the GC-MS chromatogram associated with different volatile compounds in the different anatomical parts analysed. The proposed methodology will allow to be focus on the analysis of “atypical” or critical samples, increasing the efficiency of the resources used as well as reducing its cost analysis and workload.