Mid infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometric tools for the identification of canned tuna species in brine

Abstract

Each tuna species appeared to have its unique price depending on landing, season, and nutritional value, hence, adulteration could occur by replacing tunas of high quality by those having low quality. This study was undertaken to explore the potential of mid infrared (MIR) spectroscopy for discriminating canned tunas containing different species: yellowfin, skipjack, bigeye, and albacore. A total of 218 canned tunas, produced at the pilot scale were scanned by MIR in the 4000−900 cm−1. The factorial discriminant analysis (FDA) applied to the concatenated data sets corresponding to the first 5 principal components (PCs) of the principal component analysis (PCA) applied to the 3000−2800 cm-1, 1700−1500 cm-1 and 1500−900 cm-1 spectral regions gave a model with correct classification rate amounting to 74.96 %. The established model was tested on 40 commercial canned tunas; a total (100 %) of correct classification was obtained for the bigeye tuna, while the presence of different species was observed for canned tunas labelled as skipjack, yellowfin and albacore..