Distribution of REEs in soil-citrus limon system(L.) Osbeck

The consumers have an increasing interest about food traceability with respect to safety, qualityand typicality issues. The knowledge of a chemistry relationship between the soil and theagricultural products is an important tool for the quality assessment of food. Citrus Limon is themost important fruit tree crop in the world and the detection of potential fraud could improve byusing tools linking the chemistry composition of this production to its typical growing area. Thisstudy use rare earth elements (REEs) as geochemical tracers. The REEs are a set of 14 elements,from lanthanum to lutetium that can be divided in light rare earth elements (LREEs), from La to Gdand heavy rare earth elements (HREEs), from Tb to Lu. The REEs have recognized as very usefultracers due to their generally coherent and predictable behaviour. The aim of the research is toobserve whether the fruits of various cultivars of citrus cultivated on the same soil and theirproducts (fruit and juice) reproduce the same distribution of REEs. Taking into account of ourprevious works carried out on grapevine – soil system [1,2], we applied the same technique toevaluate and trace the REEs distribution in soil– Citrus Limon fruits system. Sampling of soil and offruits was carried out in the CREA experimental farm located in Acireale (CT, Sicily) where arepresent several Citrus Limon cultivars cultivated in Sicily. The REEs amount, the HREEs/LREEsrelations and their distribution in the fruit and citrus juice with respect to the own soil weredetermined and calculated. The intriguing results obtained with a geochemical approach are thefirst on the soil–Citrus Limon fruits system.