Assessment of Minerals in Phoenix Dactylifera L. as Determined by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry using ANOVA and PCA

Dates (Phoenix dactylifera L.) is one of mankind’s oldest cultivated plants. It is known to be the most important fruit tree particularly in the Middle Eastern and Asian countries due to its natural sources of nutrition. The element composition of 10 commercially available dates and its pit samples purchased from local market were determined and evaluated using multivariate analysis technique. Samples were digested using nitric acid and hydrochloric acid and analyzed using Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES). Potassium, magnesium, calcium and sodium were found to be the major elements in both flesh and pit samples. Comparison between minor elements in both samples showed that the flesh samples contained higher levels of aluminium, barium and selenium while other minor elements were higher in the pit samples. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were performed on multivariate dataset of the flesh and the pit samples separately to observe the relationship between samples