Pradhan 2023 - elements in Heracleum nepalense fruit

Pradhan analyzed mature fruit of Heracleum nepalense, a Sikkim Himalayan plant used locally as a flavoring agent, spice, and ethnomedicine. The paper provides a single replicated elemental profile rather than a market survey, but it includes directly extractable concentrations for lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, chromium, nickel, tin, antimony, uranium, aluminum, and other elements.

Key numbers

• The tested fruit sample weighed 1473 mg before grinding; the ICP table reports all concentrations in ppb as the mean of three analytical replicates of that single pooled sample (n_samples = 1, n_analytical_replicates = 3).
• Table 1 reports lead at 59.782 ppb, cadmium at 0.769 ppb, arsenic at 2.458 ppb, mercury at 0.152 ppb, chromium at 21.846 ppb, nickel at 295.721 ppb, tin at 5.633 ppb, antimony at 5.169 ppb, uranium at 1.588 ppb, and aluminum at 429.261 ppb.
• Other reported elements include potassium 163031.511 ppb, calcium 229757.026 ppb, magnesium 37082.399 ppb, manganese 4502.770 ppb, iron 11579.974 ppb, copper 2375.719 ppb, and zinc 2654.4 ppb.
• The authors describe the measured lanthanides, actinides, and transition metals as present at extremely low concentrations.

Methods (brief)

Mature Heracleum nepalense fruits were collected from temperate forest in Sikkim and identified botanically. The dried fruit material was ground, digested with nitric acid in a CEM Mars One digestion system, diluted to 50 ml, filtered, and analyzed by inductively coupled plasma instrumentation. The source is internally inconsistent about the ICP variant (the abstract names ICP-MS while the methods body refers to “Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectroscopy”); the table reports elemental concentrations without speciation, so arsenic is treated as total arsenic, mercury as total mercury, and chromium as total chromium.

Implications

Certification: This is narrow ingredient-context evidence for a specific Himalayan spice/flavoring fruit, not a general spices-market benchmark.

Courses: The paper is useful as a clean example of broad multi-element ICP screening where speciation is not provided and the source scope is a single botanical matrix.

App: Route as spice/herb context only unless a future Heracleum-specific ingredient page is scaffolded.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Spices
• Spices
• Herbs And Spices
• Lead
• Cadmium
• Arsenic, Total
• Mercury, Total
• Chromium
• Nickel
• Tin
• Antimony
• Uranium
• Aluminum

Verification notes

• The source repeatedly describes H. nepalense fruit as used as a spice, food additive, and flavoring agent in Sikkim, which supports routeability to the broad spices product page.
• Concentrations are recorded exactly as ppb from Table 1. The page does not convert them to mg/kg because the source’s digestion-volume reporting makes direct commodity-basis conversion ambiguous.
• The PDF does not state a license in the extracted front matter.
• matrices retains only spice (a routeable matrix descriptor). The earlier heracleum-nepalense-fruit and flavoring-agent entries were not in the matrices controlled vocabulary; the botanical identity is preserved in sample_population and the use-case descriptor is captured in body prose.
• sample_n is set to 1 (one pooled fruit sample); the three “replicas” reported in Table 1 are analytical ICP runs of that single sample, not three independent biological samples. Downstream pooling should treat this source as n=1.
• Frontmatter metals: tHg reflects the Part 14 controlled vocabulary; the source measured total mercury with no speciation breakdown.

Page history

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