Can NIR Chemical Imaging Replace Traditional Wet Chemistry

Some of the difficulties experienced when developing spectroscopic techniques to replace traditional wet chemistry have related to the correlation of measurements, despite the intrinsic difference in their origin. Shenk and colleagues [3] discussed this issue in the context of NIR spectroscopy. For example, measurements of protein based on total nitrogen content are not directly equivalent to a spectroscopic approach that only probes the N—H bonds. Similarly, determining individual fatty acids from the fairly broad combination and even broader overtone bands found in the NIR region, is hardly related to the quantification of species isolated on the basis on chain length and level of saturation. 

The three examples described above are clearly distinct in terms of the level of sophistication of image data acquisition, data processing and interpretation. Nevertheless, they all use spatially resolved NIR spectra for the identification of chemi- 

Interest of NIR Chemical Imaging in Plant Breeding and CMOs 

Smail and colleagues [11] described the analysis of intact seeds using a Matrix-NIR, a focal plane array-based system operating in the spectral range 900-1700 nm. 

The GM and non-GM groups are fully separated in the training set, despite a wide variability of the spectra, a statistical challenge that is often faced in the analysis of biological samples. 

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