Identification of some wheat varieties by near infrared reflectance spectroscopy

Abstract

Abstract Variety identification by electrophoresis is not applicable to routine control in industry. In the present work, the feasibility of near infrared reflectance (n.i.r.) analysis was investigated. Two hundred and two wheat samples including 66 samples of six known varieties were collected and their n.i.r. spectra were recorded. Spectral data were mathematically corrected in order to reduce the effect of granularity on n.i.r. spectra, then Principal Component Analysis and Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) were applied to the corrected data. MDA allowed an efficient identification of the genetic origin of unknown samples: on a prediction set, 87% of samples were correctly identified. The computerised identification procedure needed less than 20 records for one sample. Further studies are necessary before recommending n.i.r. as a routine screening method.