ABSTRACT
The basic approach to nontargeted detection of adulterants is simple; build a model for authentic materials and determine whether the test sample ts in the model. As peter Scholl (pers. comm.) at US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has pointed out, this is like a Sesame Street question where young children are shown a triangle mixed with three squares and asked “Which one doesn’t t? ” Or, a slightly better analogy, the children are shown three squares and asked if the triangle is the same. The difference between the Sesame Street question and the predicament of modern science is that the spectra or chromatograms of the authentic samples are much more complex than the squares and triangles of Sesame Street. The human eye is no longer an adequate tool for detecting differences. Modern tools, such as classical statistics and chemometrics, are required.
