NIR spectroscopy and chemometric tools to identify high content of deoxynivalenol in barley

ABSTRACT

Deoxynivalenol (DON) is one of the mycotoxins produced mainly by the Fusarium graminearum species complex in small grain cereals, including barley. This toxin can cause alimentary disorders, immune function depression and gastroenteritis. The negative health effects associated with DON coupled to the increasing concern about green and rapid methods of analysis motivated this study. In this context, near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy data were applied for exploratory analysis to distinguish barley with high and low levels of DON contamination (> or <1250 µg/kg according to the European Union threshold), by Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA), and to verify the performance of Partial Least Squares-Regression (PLS-R) to predict DON concentration in barley samples. Maximum values of specificity and sensitivity were achieved in the calibration set; 90.9% and 81.9% were observed in the cross-validation set for the PLS-DA classification model. PLS-R quantification of DON in barley presented low values of error (RMSEC = 101.94 µg/kg and RMSEP = 160.76 µg/kg). Thus, we found that NIR in combination with adequate chemometric tools could be applied as a green technique to monitor DON contamination in barley.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• DON
• FT-NIR
• near infrared
• mycotoxin
• chemometrics

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for the scholarship grant of PhD student Elem Tamirys dos Santos Caramês (grant nº 142414/2016-6), to São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, grant 2017/04811-4) and CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) finance code 001.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [001]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [2017/04811-4]; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) [grant: 142414 / 2016-6].