Rapid Screening of Adulteration in Premature infant formula powders by Attenuated Total Reflectance- Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) Spectroscopy and Chemometrics

Adulteration has been one of the most significant global concerns in the field of infant formulaquality control. Proteins and long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids(LCPUFA) are the most importantnutrients in the premature infant formula powder (PIFP), so that insufficient amounts of them may restrictproper growth and development. Rice flour (RF) and soybean powder (SP) are two inexpensive and harmfuladulterants that can be added to PIFP as fat and protein, respectively. Spectroscopy is a fast, simple, cheap,and non-destructive measurement tool to analyze variant constituents of chemical systems and identifyadulterants in the food industry. The present study implemented the combinatorial method of Attenuated TotalReflectance-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy with chemometrics to identify and classifyPIFP samples contaminated with RF and SP. Soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), partialleast squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and support vector machine (SVM) were used as chemometricstechniques to identify and categorize FT-IR data. The efficiency of such chemometrics techniques wasevaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and correct-prediction percent. Based on the results, ATR-FTIRspectroscopy coupled with chemometrics techniques can be used as a fast, inexpensive, and robust method tospecify RF and SP in PIFP. Classification results obtained based on the specificity and sensitivity of SIMCA,PLS-DA, and SVM methods on PIFP samples in the test group were 91, 88; 96, 91; and 79, 80%, respectively.

Keywords:

Premature infant formula powder , Attenuated total reflection- Fourier transform Infrared Adulteration , Rice flour , Soybean powder , Chemometrics