NIR SPECTROSCOPY ANALYSIS OF β-CAROTENE AND VITAMIN E IN PUMPKIN

Pumpkin is a favorite vegetable as well as a medicinal plant for many kinds of diseases since old times.
The high content of various nutrients, especially -carotene and vitamin E, has made this vegetable more and more attractive for health protection.
A series of food products for health care as well as for babies and infants have already been developed.

A non-destructive analytical method for the quantitative determination of -carotene and vitamin E in pumpkin was developed using Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). Compared with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and fluorescence methods, this method shows similar precision; the results for these two components obtained with NIRS and the conventional methods had multiple correlation coefficients of 0.9980 and 0.9956, and standard errors of 2.87 μg and 0.025 mg, respectively.
However, the NIRS method was ten times more efficient; requiring no sample pretreatment, no chemical reagents, and the samples were not damaged after analysis.
All these advantages have made NIRS a very attractive analytical tool in plant breeding as well as for the nutritional evaluation of germplasms of pumpkin.

International Symposium on Vegetable Quality of Fresh and Fermented Vegetables

T. Jin, Z. Wu, L. Liu, X. Li

HPLC, nutrients, fluorescence method, germplasm, multiple correlation

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1999.483.30