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Comparison of Different Types of NIR Instruments in Ability to Measure β-Glucan Content in Naked Barley

¹Department of Food Science and Technology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Muthgasse 18, 1190 Vienna, Austria. ²Corresponding author. E-mail: julia.schmidt@boku.ac.at ³Department of Applied Biotechnology and Food Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Müegyetem rkp. 3, 1111 Budapest, Hungary. ⁴Dept. Applied Plant Sciences and Plant Biotechnology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Gregor Mendel Strasse 33, 1180 Vienna, Austria.

Importance of β-glucan in human nutrition is mirrored in numerous approval applications registering β-glucan containing products as health beneficial products in accordance with forthcoming EU Health Claims Regulation. In comparison to other cereals, barley contains considerable amounts of β-glucan. Naked barley is of particular interest because it circumvents the costs and loss of beneficial substances related to dehusking. In this study, the potential of near-infrared spectroscopy as an accurate, fast and economic method of determination of β-glucan in naked barley was appraised. Four different near-infrared instruments were used to analyze 107 barley samples, in both whole grain and milled form. Importantly, both black and purple pericarp samples, which are of additional nutritional interest due to high anthocyanin content, and waxy samples, which show an extraordinary high β-glucan content could be analyzed within the same calibration set as the normal samples. All tested dispersive near-infrared reflection instruments showed suitability for supervision of breeding experiments and β-glucan monitoring in food industries (R² > 0.78). Common, industrially used near-infrared transmission instruments also provided reasonable results, although only suitable for rough selection according to β-glucan levels. On the other hand, the Fourier transform near-infrared reflection instrument was able to perform analytical analyses (R² = 0.96–0.98).