In Situ Quality Assessment of Dried Sea Cucumber (Stichopus japonicus) Oxidation Characteristics during Storage by iKnife Rapid Evaporative Ionization Mass Spectrometry

Sea cucumber (Stichopus japonicus) is one of the most luxurious and nutritious seafoods in Asia. It is always processed into dried products to prevent autolysis, but its quality is easily destructed during storage. Herein, an extremely simplified workflow was established for real-time and in situ quality assessment of dried sea cucumbers (DSCs) during storage based on the lipid oxidation characteristics using an intelligent surgical knife (iKnife) coupled with rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS). The lipidomic phenotypes of DSCs at different storage times were acquired successfully, which were then processed by multivariate statistical analysis. The results showed that the discrepancy in the characteristic ions in different DSCs was significant (p < 0.05) with high R-2(Y) and Q(2) values (0.975 and 0.986, respectively). The receiver operating characteristic curve revealed that the ions of m/z 739.5, m/z 831.5, m/z 847.6, and m/z 859.6 were the most specific and characteristic candidate biomarkers for quality assessment of DSCs during accelerated storage. Finally, this method was validated to be qualified in precision (RSDintraday <= 9.65% and RSDinterday <= 9.36%). In conclusion, the results showed that the well-established iKnife-REIMS method was high-throughput, rapid, and reliable in the real-time quality assessment of DSCs.

Automated summary

A simplified workflow using an iKnife coupled with REIMS was established for real-time quality assessment of dried sea cucumbers (DSCs) based on lipid oxidation characteristics. The method successfully acquired lipidomic phenotypes of DSCs at different storage times and identified specific candidate biomarkers for quality assessment. Results showed high-throughput, rapid, and reliable performance for real-time quality assessment of DSCs.