Feasibility of conventional and Roundup Ready® soybeans discrimination by different near infrared reflectance technologies

Identification and proper labelling of genetically modified organisms is required and increasingly demanded by legislation and consumers worldwide. In this study, the feasibility of three near infrared reflectance technologies (a chemical imaging unit, a commercial diode array instrument, and a light tube non-commercial instrument) were compared for discriminating Roundup Ready® and not genetically modified soybean seeds. Over 200 seeds of each class (Roundup Ready® and conventional) were used. Principal Component Analysis with Artificial Neural Networks (PCA–ANN) and Locally Weighted Principal Component Regression (LW-PCR) were used for creating the discrimination models. Discrimination accuracies when new tested seeds belonged to samples included in the training sets achieved accuracies over 90% of correctly classified seeds for LW-PCR models. The light tube performed the best, while the imaging unit showed the worse accuracies overall. Models validated with new seeds from samples not included in the training set had accuracies of 72–79%.