Composition Of Minerals And Trace Elements Contents Of Raw Unclean And Raw Clean Edible Bird Nest (EBN) Analyzed Using ICP-MS

Norakmar, I., Roosnoor, F.H., Izwan, l., Ernah, G., Nor Azlina, J., and Faridah, I.

Norakmar, I., Roosnoor, F.H., Izwan, l., Ernah, G., Nor Azlina, J., and Faridah, I.

Edible bird’s nest (EBN) as the most expensive animal product in the world has been reported to contain essential amino acids, sialic acid and minerals beneficial to human health. In tracing the geographical origin of food, the evaluation of trace element content has been selected as a one of the most relevam method to investigate geographical origin due to the well-known fact that the content of selected minerals and trace elements in foods clearly reflects the soil type and the environmental growing conditions. In the case of EBN, the contents of minerals and trace elements might be closely related to the surroundings where the nest was found and the insects eaten by the swiflets. As a premium quality medicinal food product, the authentication of EBN are important to preserve the quality of EBN as the industry brings in millions of profit to the country annually due to exportation or high quality EBN especially the ones collected naturally in the cave of rural area of Malaysia. By having a specific method to trace the on gin of EBN, it will prevent false claim on the origin country of EBN and hence preserve Malaysia as one of the exporter of premium high quality EBN. Inductively Coupled Plasma – Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) is a widely known instrument in quantitative analysis of minerals and trace elements in various kinds of samples with relatively high sensitivity and very low limit of quantification (LOQ). Having the capability of multi-element and isotopic analysis, ICP-MS is a very applicable and powerful analytical tool to be used in this study. The aim of this study is to analyze EBN using ICP-MS to investigate the presence of minerals, trace elements and the possibility of elemental marker in EBN. As a conclusion, it was found that both raw clean and raw unclean EBN contains high amount of minerals essential to human health as reported by previous studies. Besides being the source of nutrients, the contents of minerals and elements in EBN could also contribute to other findings such as the source and origin of the nest, in which further statistical analysis need to be applied for this purpose.