Decoding the Effect of Age on the Taste Perception of Chicken Breast Soup Based on LC-QTOF-MS/MS Combined with a Chemometric Approach

A nontargeted fingerprinting approach combined with the chemometrics method and sensory analysis was used to assess the differences in taste-chemical compositions of chicken breast soup with different ages and their sensory qualities. The sensory evaluation results showed that the overall taste as well as the sourness, saltiness, and umami scores of the soup were increased with the age of chicken. Fifty-nine compounds were identified from four soup samples by liquid chromatography-tandem quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF-MS/MS), and their total content was the highest in the 90 wk soup samples. Six upregulated compounds (carnosine, hypoxanthine, inosine, inosine 5′-monophosphate (5′-IMP), adenosine 5′-monophosphate (5′-AMP), and lactic acid) were identified as potential contributors to the taste characteristics of the 90 wk soup samples by orthogonal projections to latent structures–discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA). Additional experiments showed that 5′-AMP particularly contributed to the sourness of the soup, while carnosine contributed to the saltiness and umami of the soup.