Abstract
Fusarium proliferatum is considered to be a pathogen of many economically important plants, including garlic. The objective of this research was to apply near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to rapidly determine fungal concentration in intact garlic cloves, avoiding the laborious and time-consuming procedures of traditional assays. Preventive detection of infection before seeding is of great interest for farmers, because it could avoid serious losses of yield during harvesting and storage. Spectra were collected on 95 garlic cloves, divided in five classes of infection (from 1-healthy to 5-very highly infected) in the range of fungal concentration 0.34–7231.15 ppb. Calibration and cross validation models were developed with partial least squares regression (PLSR) on pretreated spectra (standard normal variate, SNV, and derivatives), providing good accuracy in prediction, with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.829 and 0.774, respectively, a standard error of calibration (SEC) of 615.17 ppb, and a standard error of cross validation (SECV) of 717.41 ppb. The calibration model was then used to predict fungal concentration in unknown samples, peeled and unpeeled. The results showed that NIRS could be used as a reliable tool to directly detect and quantify F. proliferatum infection in peeled intact garlic cloves, but the presence of the external peel strongly affected the prediction reliability.
Highlights
Fusarium proliferatum is a world-wide occurring saprophytic fungi, known to be a causal agent of several diseases for a broad range of economically important plants [1]
Absolute quantification yields the exact number of target DNA molecules by comparison with the DNA standards using a calibration curve, and in this case has allowed the quantification of active biomass of F. proliferatum in each clove sample
External validation with peeled samples showed that the prediction ability of the model, even though satisfactorily and a promising predictive ability of Theimprovable, application was of quite
Summary
Fusarium proliferatum is a world-wide occurring saprophytic fungi, known to be a causal agent of several diseases for a broad range of economically important plants [1]. F. proliferatum is known to be one of the main causes of maize cob fusariosis [5,6], but can colonize wheat, barley, rice, asparagus, pea, onion, tomato, pineapple, and various palms [7,8,9,10]. It has been isolated from uncultivated plants including reed, sorrel, prairie grasses, and pine [11]. The great majority of the already-existing techniques are conceived to either determine mycotoxin content in samples using instrumental chromatography techniques [13], or directly identify the fungal infection by genetic
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