Non-Destructive NIR Spectrometric Cultivar Discrimination of Castor Seeds Resulting from Breeding Programs

• Published in: Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society Vol. 25; no. 5; pp. 969 - 974
• Main Authors: Santos, Maria B. H., Gomes, Adriano A., Vilar, Welma T. S., Almeida, Pollyne B. A., Milani, Máira, Nóbrega, Márcia B. M., Medeiros, Everaldo P., Galvão, Roberto K. H., Araújo, Mário C. U.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sociedade Brasileira de Química 01-05-2014
• Subjects: CHEMISTRY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY; discrimination of cultivars; PLS-DA; castor seeds; SIMCA; near-infrared diffuse reflectance spectrometry
• ISSN: 0103-5053; 1678-4790
• DOI: 10.5935/0103-5053.20140068

This article proposes a near-infrared (NIR) diffuse reflectance spectrometric method for non-destructive discrimination of castor seeds from the two cultivars most commonly employed in Brazilian plantations (BRS Nordestina and BRS Paraguaçu). For this purpose, two classification techniques are compared, namely SIMCA (soft independent modelling of class analogies) and PLS-DA (partial least squares discriminant analysis). By applying the SIMCA classifier to a test set comprising 150 seeds, the BRS Nordestina and BRS Paraguaçu class models yielded sensitivity/specificity values of 0.91/0.99 and 0.71/1.00, respectively. Better results were obtained by using PLS-DA, which correctly classified all test samples, i.e., yielded sensitivity and specificity values of 1.00. These findings suggest that the proposed method is a promising approach to identify castor seed genotypes, either in seed lots or for breeding purposes, prior to being planted.