Characterisation of organic and conventional sweet basil leaves using chromatographic and flow-injection mass spectrometric (FIMS) fingerprints combined with principal component analysis

Sweet basil, Ocimum basilicum, is one of the most important and wildly used spices and has been shown to have antioxidant, antibacterial, and anti-diarrheal activities. In this study, high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) and flow-injection mass spectrometric (FIMS) fingerprinting techniques were used to differentiate organic and conventional sweet basil leaf samples. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the fingerprints indicated that both HPLC and FIMS fingerprints could effectively detect the chemical differences in the organic and conventional sweet basil leaf samples. This study suggested that the organic basil sample contained greater concentrations of almost all the major compounds than its conventional counterpart on a per same botanical weight basis. The FIMS method was able to rapidly differentiate the organic and conventional sweet basil leaf samples (1 min analysis time), whereas the HPLC fingerprints provided more information about the chemical composition of the basil samples with a longer analytical time.