Quality Degradation of Chinese White Lotus Seeds Caused by Dampening during Processing and Storage: Rapid and Nondestructive Discrimination Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Lu Xu,Yuan-Bin She,Chen-Bo Cai,Hai-Yan Fu

doi:10.1155/2015/345352

Abstract

Dampening during processing or storage can largely influence the quality of white lotus seeds (WLS). This paper investigated the feasibility of using near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and chemometrics for rapid and nondestructive discrimination of the dampened WLS. Regular (n = 167) and dampened (n = 118) WLS objects were collected from five main producing areas and NIR reflectance spectra (4000–12000 cm−1) were measured for bare kernels. The influence of spectral preprocessing methods, including smoothing, taking second-order derivatives (D2), and standard normal variate (SNV), on partial least squares discrimination analysis (PLSDA) was compared to select the optimal data preprocessing method. A moving-window strategy was combined with PLSDA (MWPLSDA) to select the most informative wavelength intervals for classification. Based on the selected spectral ranges, the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 0.927, 0.950, and 0.937 for SNV-MWPLSDA, respectively.

Highlights

Lotus (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn.) is an aquatic perennial from family Nelumbonaceae
In order to make sure that the training set includes correctly labeled samples, each white lotus seeds (WLS) kernel for analysis was manually divided into two cotyledons and the embryo of the kernel was examined
Because the spectral range of 9000–12000 cm−1 was seriously influenced by baseline shifts, only the spectral range of 4000– 9000 cm−1 was used for chemometric analysis

Summary

Introduction

Lotus (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn.) is an aquatic perennial from family Nelumbonaceae. Lotus has been cultivated for thousands of years in China and nowadays it is widely grown and common in India, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the US [1]. All parts of lotus, such as its seeds, rhizomes, leaves, flowers, and stamens, are consumed worldwide [2]. The most important reason for its current widespread planting is the consumption of lotus roots and seeds. Lotus seed (Lianzi in Chinese) is widely consumed as a valuable functional food in China for soups, congee, pastries, and other dishes. Lotus seeds have been used to treat tissue inflammation, cancer, diuretics, and some skin diseases in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicines [1, 8, 9]. Pharmacological experiments indicate that lotus seeds have strong antipyretic, cooling, astringent, demulcent, antioxidant properties, as well as scavenging effects on reactive nitrogen species [10,11,12,13,14]

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