PAHs presence and source apportionment in honey samples: Fingerprint identification of rural and urban contamination by means of chemometric approach.

• Determination of 22 PAHs in honey samples by DLLME-GC–MS. • Chemometric approach for identifying the main PAHs responsible of contamination. • Comparison with similar database for evidencing the contamination sources. • Chemometrics for tracing the food quality based on the production area. The quality of honey is assessed through the determination of some commodity parameters: a certain importance is to be attributed to the absence of contaminating residues, in particular of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). This paper deeply investigates the presence of 22 PAHs in 57 honey samples collected in Central Italy and identifies the possible source apportionment and fingerprint identification by DLLME-GC–MS analysis and a chemometric approach. Cluster Analysis and Principal Component Analysis have allowed to identify the main PAHs responsible of the contamination, benzo[ a ]anthracene and phenanthrene, characteristics pollutants of areas constantly exposed. The entire database has been compared to similar ones present in literature, particularly data from Serbia and Belgrado samples. The PCA applied to overall the data confirms the combustion to be the main contamination source in Italian samples whereas highlights the importance of the role of naphthalene, added during beekeeping practices in the other data-set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]