Screening Ethiopian mustard for erucic acid by near infrared reflectance spectroscopy

Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) has not been tested sufficiently for its capacity to estimate erucic acid in Brassica species. Our objective was to evaluate the potential of NIRS for screening whole-seed samples of Ethiopian mustard (Brassica carinata A. Braun) for erucic acid concentration, A total of 1440 samples previously analyzed by gas-liquid chromatography (GLC) were scanned by NIRS. Samples for calibration and validation were selected according to their erucic acid concentration, A calibration equation was developed and its validation gave a coefficient of multiple determination (r(2)) of 0.96, A comparison between GLC values and NIRS estimation was performed with the remaining samples not included in the calibration and validation sets, We found that 90% of samples were classified by NIRS in the same or an adjacent class as those determined by GLC. It demonstrates that screening for erucic acid in this species can be performed with high reliability by means of NIRS.