Development of non-destructive methods to evaluate oyster quality by electronic nose technology

The effectiveness of two electronic nose (e-nose) systems to assess the quality of oysters was studied on live oysters stored at 4 and 7°C for 14 days. E-nose data were correlated with a trained sensory panel evaluation by quantitative description analysis and with aerobic plate count. Oysters stored at both temperatures exhibited varying degrees of microbial spoilage, with bacterial load reaching 10 ⁷ CFU/g at day 7 for 7°C storage. Cyranose 320 e-nose system was capable of generating characterized smell prints to differentiate oyster qualities of varying age (100% separation). The validation results showed that Cyranose 320 can identify the quality of oysters in terms of storage time with 93% accuracy. Comparatively, the correct classification rate for VOCcheck e-nose was only 22%. Correlation of e-nose data with microbial counts suggested Cyranose 320 was able to predict the microbial quality of oysters. Correlation of sensory panel scores with e-nose data revealed that e-nose has demonstrated potential as a quality assessment tool by mapping varying degrees of oyster quality.