Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS

Tanaka, Takayoshi; Zhang, Junhan; Isoya, Shuntaro; Maeda, Tatsuro; Hasegawa, Kazuya; Araki, Tetsuya

doi:10.3390/foods14152751

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Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS

by

Takayoshi Tanaka

¹,

Junhan Zhang

¹,

Shuntaro Isoya

²,

Tatsuro Maeda

^2,*

,

Kazuya Hasegawa

²

and

Tetsuya Araki

¹

Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-003, Japan

²

Department of Health and Dietetics, Teikyo Heisei University, Tokyo 170-8445, Japan

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Foods 2025, 14(15), 2751; https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751

Submission received: 23 June 2025 / Revised: 4 August 2025 / Accepted: 5 August 2025 / Published: 6 August 2025

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies)

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Abstract

Cooked-rice aroma strongly affects consumer choice, yet the chemical traits distinguishing glutinous rice from normal-amylose japonica rice remain underexplored because earlier studies targeted only a few dozen volatiles using one-dimensional gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In this study, four glutinous and seven normal Japanese cultivars were cooked under identical conditions, their headspace volatiles trapped with MonoTrap and qualitatively profiled by comprehensive GC × GC-TOFMS. The two-dimensional platform resolved 1924 peaks—about ten-fold previous coverage—and, together with hierarchical clustering, PCA, heatmap visualization and volcano plots, cleanly separated the starch classes (78.3% cumulative PCA variance; Euclidean distance >140). Volcano plots highlighted 277 compounds enriched in the glutinous cultivars and 295 in Koshihikari, including 270 compounds that were not previously documented in rice. Normal cultivars were dominated by ethers, aldehydes, amines and other nitrogenous volatiles associated with grainy, grassy and toasty notes. Glutinous cultivars showed abundant ketones, furans, carboxylic acids, thiols, steroids, nitro compounds, pyrroles and diverse hydrocarbons and aromatics, yielding sweeter, fruitier and floral accents. These results expand the volatile library for japonica rice, provide molecular markers for flavor-oriented breeding and demonstrate the power of GC × GC-TOFMS coupled with chemometrics for grain aroma research.

Keywords: GC × GC-TOFMS; japonica rice; glutinous (waxy) rice; volatile organic compounds; functional group profiling; chemometric analysis

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MDPI and ACS Style

Tanaka, T.; Zhang, J.; Isoya, S.; Maeda, T.; Hasegawa, K.; Araki, T. Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS. Foods 2025, 14, 2751. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751

AMA Style

Tanaka T, Zhang J, Isoya S, Maeda T, Hasegawa K, Araki T. Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS. Foods. 2025; 14(15):2751. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751

Chicago/Turabian Style

Tanaka, Takayoshi, Junhan Zhang, Shuntaro Isoya, Tatsuro Maeda, Kazuya Hasegawa, and Tetsuya Araki. 2025. "Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS" Foods 14, no. 15: 2751. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751

APA Style

Tanaka, T., Zhang, J., Isoya, S., Maeda, T., Hasegawa, K., & Araki, T. (2025). Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS. Foods, 14(15), 2751. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751

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Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS

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