Abstract:Economically motivated adulteration of edible oils endangers consumers’ health and disturbs oil market, which is necessary to establish scientific and reasonable methods for adulteration detection of edible oils. At present, there are four kinds of methods of adulteration detection of edible oils, including quality analysis of ordinary parameters according to national standards, rapid adulteration detection based on spectrometric techniques, metabolomic-guided fingerprints and accurate adulteration methods based on characteristic markers, which can complement each other based on their obvious advantages and disadvantages. Among these methods, the adulteration methods based on characteristic markers have drawn more and more attentions from researches due to high selectivity of markers and high accuracy of multivariate adulteration detection, which can be used to identify a variety of edible oils adulteration at the same time.. In this review, we summarized the research progress on the application of characteristic markers of adulteration detection in edible oils, which included DNA, fatty acid and triacylglycerol, phytosterols, Vitamin E and the exogenous substances introduced during processing. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of these methods were analyzed. In conclusion, we found that the further researches on this direction should focus on further discovery of markers of edible oils and highly sensitive and simultaneous detection methods for characteristic markers in several edible oils.
