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Because there is such a high worldwide demand for cinnamon spices, true cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum) powder is often adulterated with another inferior quality of cinnamon known as cassia cinnamon (Cinnamomum aromaticum). Korean researchers employed Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopic analysis to determine the spectral differences in authentic and adulterated samples. Absorbance spectra of 195 samples of true, cassia and various adulterated samples (5-50% w/w adulterant) with 15 replicates for each sample  were collected. The partial least square regression (PLSR) models with spectral pre-processing methods were applied to predict the presence of cassia cinnamon in true cinnamon powder. The predictive value of FT-NIR data was greater than the FT-IR data. The study shows that FT-NIR and FT-IR spectroscopic techniques combined with multivariate analysis could be utilised as a controlled procedure or as an alternative rapid detection method to identify adulterated cinnamon powder.

 Read the abstract here

Canadian researchers have developed a Fourier transformed-infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy optimised protocol for analysing both qualitatively and quantitatively beef mince potentially adulterated with six types of beef and/or pork offal (beef tripe, beef liver, beef omasum, pork heart, pork kidney and pork liver). Two dimensional PCA (principal component analysis) chemometric analysis was applied to the authentic dataset of FT-IR spectra, but did not give sufficient discrimination. An optimised chemometric model based on LDA (linear discriminant analysis), PCA-DA, and PLS-DA (partial least squares-discriminant analysis) was found to give more accurate determination and low error rate for 3 classes of samples- beef, beef offal or pork offal. Once the offal is identified, a further chemometric analysis - PLSR (PLS regression) can be performed to determine accurately the amount of offal present. 

Read the full paper at: FTIR Method for Offal in Beef Mince