COMPARISON OF 3 WHOLE SEED NEAR-INFRARED ANALYZERS FOR MEASURING QUALITY COMPONENTS OF CANOLA SEED

Whole seed near-infrared (NIR) analyzers are capable of high-speed compositional analysis of oilseed commodities. This study compared the PerCon Inframatic 8144 (Perten Instruments, North America Inc., Reno, NV), the Tecator Infratec 1225 (Tecator AB, Hoganas, Sweden) and the NIR-systems 6500 (NIR Systems, Inc., Silver Spring, MD) analyzers for measurement of oil, protein, chlorophyll and glucosinolates in intact canola seed of composite samples from the Grain Research Laboratory's (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) annual Western Canada Harvest Surveys (1985-1989) for assembly of calibration and prediction sets. No significant differences were found between the three instruments for oil [standard error of prediction (SEP 0.43-0.55%)], protein (SEP 0.35-0.42%) and glucosinolates (SEP 2.4-3.8 mM/g). Neither the Tecator nor the PerCon instruments were effective for determining chlorophyll. By combining oil content and fatty acid composition data to give an estimate of the total level of each fatty acid in the sample, high correlations were obtained for total saturates, linolenic acid, and linoleic acid although the RPD (ratio of the S.E. of prediction to the S.D. of the original data) values were not high enough to enable routine use of the method to predict results.