Green Chemometric-Assisted Characterization of Common and Black Varieties of Celery

Celery (Apium graveolens L., var. Dulce), is a biennial herbaceous plant belonging to the Apiaceae family, cultivated in humid soils in the Mediterranean basin, in Central-Southern Europe, and in Asia. Despite its wide diffusion and although it is well-known that cultivar/origin strongly influences plant composition, only a few studies have been carried out on the different types of celery. The present work aims to investigate four different Italian types of celery (two common, Elne and Magnum celery, and two black, Torricella Peligna Black and Trevi Black celery), and to test, whether the combination of FT-IR spectroscopy and chemometrics allows their ecotype discrimination. The peculiarity of this study lies in the fact that all the analyzed celeries were grown in the same experimental field under the same soil and climate conditions. Consequently, the differences captured by the FT-IR-based tool are mainly imputable to the different ecotypes. In order to achieve this goal, FT-IR profiles were handled by two diverse classifiers: sequential preprocessing through ORThogonalization (SPORT) and soft independent modeling by class analogy (SIMCA). Eventually, the highest classification rate (90%, on an external set of 100 samples) has been achieved by SPORT.