Publication Cover
Spectroscopy Letters
An International Journal for Rapid Communication
Volume 50, 2017 - Issue 9
493
Views
28
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Comparative study of albumen pH and whole egg pH for the evaluation of egg freshness

, , & ORCID Icon
Pages 463-469 | Received 21 Feb 2017, Accepted 21 Jul 2017, Published online: 11 Oct 2017
 

ABSTRACT

The Haugh unit (HU) is the most widely used measure to assess egg freshness. It is crucial and difficult to measure albumen height as a variable of the HU, especially for stale eggs. Albumen pH is strongly correlated to the HU and rarely affected by age or strain, except for storage. The prediction of albumen pH is a better indicator of egg freshness than the HU. Albumen is separated from the yolk in the albumen pH test, while in the whole egg pH measurement, it is not necessary to separate the albumen from the yolk. The objective of this research was to compare the albumen pH with the whole egg pH using visible near-infrared spectroscopy. Spectra were acquired using transmitted light on white-shelled eggs. Pretreatment methods containing multiplicative scatter correction, the standard normal variate (SNV), the first derivative, and the second derivative were used. A partial least square regression (PLSR) was used to set up prediction models. The results illustrated that PLSR models preprocessed by the SNV of albumen pH and whole egg pH were superior to other models. In the best prediction models, the correlation coefficients for albumen pH and whole egg pH were 0.923 and 0.752, and the root mean square error values were 0.170 and 0.265, respectively. The prediction models of albumen pH were better than those of whole egg pH using the PLSR method. In addition, the relevant information concerning albumen pH and whole egg pH ranged from 550 to 850 nm.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation Project of China (No. 31571921) and the Natural Science Foundation Project of Beijing, China (No. 6162015) for supporting this research.

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 61.00 Add to cart

Issue Purchase

  • 30 days online access to complete issue
  • Article PDFs can be downloaded
  • Article PDFs can be printed
USD 745.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.