Detection and quantification of offal content in ground beef meat using vibrational spectroscopic-based chemometric analysis

Yaxi Hu,Xiaolin Huang,Xiaonan Lu,Liang Zou

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-15389-3

Abstract

As less consumed animal by-product, beef and pork offal have chances to sneak into the authentic ground beef meat products, and thus a rapid and accurate detection and quantification technique is highly required. In this study, Fourier transformed-infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy was investigated to develop an optimized protocol for analyzing ground beef meat potentially adulterated with six types of beef and pork offal. Various chemometric models for classification and quantification were constructed for the collected FT-IR spectra. Applying optimized chemometric models, FT-IR spectroscopy could differentiate authentic beef meat from adulterated samples with >99% accuracy, to identify the type of offal in the sample with >80% confidence, and to quantify five types of offal in an accurate manner (R2 > 0.81). An optimized protocol was developed to authenticate ground beef meat as well as identify and quantify the offal adulterants using FT-IR spectroscopy coupled with chemometric models. This protocol offers a limit of detection <10% w/w of offal in ground beef meat and can be applied by governmental laboratories and food industry to rapidly monitor the integrity of ground beef meat products.

Highlights

Ground or minced meat is an important meat product for food companies and consumers[1] because of its wide usage in food products, such as sausages, burger patties, meatballs, meat fillings and numerous other dishes
Partial least squares regression (PLSR) models were constructed to quantify the concentration of each type of offal individually in the adulterated meat samples with acceptable accuracy[9,16,17]
Among six types of offal samples, beef liver and pork liver exhibited highly similar Fourier transformed-infrared (FT-IR) spectral pattern; the spectral features between pork heart and pork kidney could not be differentiated by simple visual inspection

Summary

Introduction

Ground or minced meat is an important meat product for food companies and consumers[1] because of its wide usage in food products, such as sausages, burger patties, meatballs, meat fillings and numerous other dishes. Techniques including liquid chromatographic based methods, vibrational spectroscopies [e.g. Raman, infrared (IR) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies], and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays all exhibited high capability to detecting adulterants from other animals[7,8,9,10,11]. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) models were constructed to quantify the concentration of each type of offal individually in the adulterated meat samples with acceptable accuracy[9,16,17] It was not feasible for these PLSR models to be applied to real samples because the specific type of adulterant in the adulterated beef meat sample was unknown and could not be identified using any classification model constructed in those studies. To apply the vibrational spectroscopic-based chemometric analysis to samples in the marketplace, further modification and optimization of chemometric analysis and the combination of different chemometric models are required

Methods

Results

Conclusion