Discriminating muscle type of selected game species using near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy

CITATION: Dumalisile, P. et al. 2020. Discriminating muscle type of selected game species using near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. Food Control, 110. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2019.106981.

The original publication is available at http://www.journals.elsevier.com/food-control/

In this study near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was used to discriminate between different muscle types within each species of selected game animals, and to classify species regardless of the muscle. Muscle steaks from longissimus thoracis et lumborum (LTL) located at the 6th rib of the carcasses, infraspinatus (IS) and supraspinatus (SS) located on the forequarter, and biceps femoris (BF), semitendinosus (ST) and semimembranosus (SM) located on the hindquarter of impala and eland species; and samples from fan fillet (FF), big drum (BD), triangle steak (TS), moon steak (MS) and rump steak (RS) of ostrich species were scanned with a handheld NIR spectrophotometer in the spectral range of 908–1700 nm. Spectra were pre-treated with different pre-processing methods and classification models were developed using partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). Classification accuracies were higher when the muscles were grouped according to their anatomical location in the carcass, than attempting to classify them separately. Classification accuracies ranging from 85.0 to 100% were achieved throughout, with forequarter muscles yielding the highest classification accuracy rate for both impala and eland species. Furthermore, when the species were discriminated regardless of muscles, PLS-DA models pre-treated with SNV-Detrend and Savitzky-Golay 1st derivative yielded accuracies of 97, 81 and 92% for eland, impala and ostrich, respectively. These results indicate that NIR spectroscopy can be used for the authentication of game meat, specifically impala, eland and ostrich. Furthermore, it was easier to discriminate species regardless of the muscle used than different muscles within each species.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956713519305705

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