Abstract
The usefulness of triacylglycerol (TAG) profiles established by high-performance liquid chromatography using both UV and evaporative light scattering (ELSD) detectors as a tool to discriminate between seven cultivars of Tunisian extra virgin olive oils (EVOOs) was evaluated in this work. Moreover, the discrimination of EVOOs from the cultivars Chemchali, Fouji and Zarrazi, characterized with different maturity indexes, was also studied. With both detectors, a total of 19 peaks, which were common to all the EVOOs studied, were observed. However, ELSD peaks, which provided a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the UV peaks, were selected to construct linear discriminant analysis models for cultivar and maturity index prediction. In all cases, an excellent resolution between all category pairs was achieved, which demonstrated that TAG profiles are a good marker of both cultivar and maturity index of EVOOs.