1Food and Agricultural Materials Inspection Center, Kobe Regional Center, Kobe, Hyogo 651-0082, 2Food and Agricultural Materials Inspection Center, Chuo, Saitama 330-9731, Japan
A technique to determine the geographic origin of dried kelp was developed by using 250 samples from Japan and from China. Twelve elements contained in dried kelp were determined by ICP-MS. We developed four linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models for each kelp calibrated with concentrations of 2 elements (Mn and Ba) chosen by backward stepwise regression. These LDA models distinguished the origin of dried kelp with 97.5-100% certainty and distinguished with 97.5-100% certainty on the validation test by 10-fold cross validation. Thus, we could determine the geographic origin of dried kelp with a high degree of accuracy using these discrimination models.