Discrimination of European wheat varieties using near infrared reflectance spectroscopy

Near infrared reflectance (NIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometrics was used to discriminate wheat varieties. A total of 249 samples of different wheat varieties from the 2003–2004 harvest were used to develop the best discriminant equation, by applying various scatters and mathematical treatments in the range of 400–2500 nm. Wheat varieties from Spain were ‘Sarina’, ‘Bolero’, ‘Berdún’, ‘Soisson’, ‘Chamorro’, ‘Artur Nick’, ‘Berdun’, ‘Marius’, ‘Anza’, ‘Kalifa’, and wheat varieties from France were ‘Galibier’ and ‘Quality’. The equation developed with the highest accuracy had an applied scatter of weighted multiplicative scatter correction, a math treatment of 2, 15, 8 (order of derivative, gap data points over which the derivative was taken, number of data points used in performing average smoothing). The percentage of correctly identified varieties was 99.5% for the calibration sample set and 94% for the validation sample set. The results demonstrated the usefulness of NIRS combined with chemometrics as a rapid method for discrimination of European wheat varieties. Although the application of the discriminant equation developed for the 2003–2004 harvest yielded a high rate, further test measurements are necessary to evaluate the robustness of the equation.