To construct a standard fingerprint of monosaccharides in edible bird’s nest by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and identify the adulteration of edible bird’s nest.

Taking edible bird’s nest as the research object, 34 batches of monosaccharides in edible bird’s nest from different suppliers were analyzed by GC-MS. And a standard fingerprint of monosaccharides in edible bird’s nest was established using the“similarity evaluation system of traditional Chinese medicine chromatographic fingerprint”. The fingerprint was used to identify adulteration models of tremella fuciformis polysaccharide, yellow gelatin, pectin, gellan gum, carrageenan and agar with adulteration amounts of 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% and 50%, respectively.

Edible bird’s nest contains 5 kinds of monosaccharide components: fucose, mannose, galactose, acetylglucosamine and acetylgalactosamine, with an average relative mass ratio of 1:1.5:8.4:6.6:4.1, and the total sugar content ranging from 18.75 g/100 g to 23.92 g/100 g, through similarity evaluation, the similarity of 34 batches of edible bird’s nests was more than 99.5%, meeting the requirements of fingerprint similarity evaluation. Taking a similarity of 99.8% as the identification standard for edible bird’s nests, when the adulteration level ranges from 1% to 50%, the fingerprint adulteration model could effectively predict the adulteration level and achieve adulteration identification.

This study analyzes the monosaccharide composition of edible bird’s nest and established a GC-MS-based standard monosaccharide fingerprint and adulteration model. This approach enables effective identification of common adulterants and quantification of adulteration ratios, offering data and technical support for market supervision.