Determination of Adulteration of Chicken Meat into Minced Beef Mixtures using Front Face Fluorescence Spectroscopy Coupled with Chemometric

The objective of this study was to explore the potential of front face fluorescence spectroscopy (FFFS) as rapid, non-destructive and inclusive technique along with multi-variate analysis for predicting meat adulteration. For this purpose (FFFS) was used to discriminate pure minced beef meat and adulterated minced beef meat containing (1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, and 100%) of chicken meat as an adulterant in uncooked beef meat samples. Fixed excitation (290 nm, 322 nm, and 340 nm) and fixed emission (410 nm) wavelengths were used for performing analysis. Fluorescence spectra were acquired from pure and adulterated meat samples to differentiate pure and binary mixtures of meat samples. Principle component analysis, partial least square regression and hierarchical cluster analysis were used as chemometric tools to find out the information from spectral data. These chemometric tools predict adulteration in minced beef meat up to 10% chicken meat but are not good in distinguishing adulteration level from 1% to 5%. The results of this research provide baseline for future work for generating spectral libraries using larger datasets for on-line detection of meat authenticity by using fluorescence spectroscopy.