Rapid and Nondestructive Determination of Fatty acid Contents in Shell-Intact Cottonseed by Near Infrared Spectroscopy

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was applied for the rapid and nondestructive determination of fatty acid contents in shell. intact crop seed. Total 385 samples of cottonseed were used in this experiment. Linear partial least squares (PLS) and nonlinear least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) methods with the variables selected by Monte Cario uninformative variables elimination (MC-UVE) method were used to develop the calibration models to predict the content of fatty acid contents. A best prediction performance was obtained by using the MC-UVE-LS-SVM models. The correlation coefficients (R-2) of calibration models for palmitic acid, stearic acid, oleic acid, linoleic acid, saturate fatty acids, unsaturated fatty acids were 0. 863, 0. 881, 0. 843, 0. 806, 0. 894 and 0. 917, respectively; the residual predictive deviations (RPD) were 2. 669, 2. 880, 2. 508, 2. 202, 3. 023 and 3. 473, respectively. The results indicated that NIR technology could be usedl for the rapid quality analysis of shell-intact cottonseed avoiding the need of grinding. Furthermore, the variable selection of MC-UVE could provide more robust and accurate calibration models.