Prediction of Fatty Acid Content in Beef Neck Lean by near Infrared Reflectance Analysis

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in the prediction of individual and total fatty acids of bovine M. Longissimus dorsi neck muscles has been studied. Beef neck lean was collected from meat processing establishments using advanced meat recovery systems and hand-deboning. Samples (n = 302) were analysed to determine fatty acid (FA) composition and scanned from 400 to 2498 nm. Total saturated and unsaturated FA values ranged from 43.2 to 62.0% and 38.3 to 56.2%, respectively. Results of partial least squares (PLS) modeling shown reasonably accurate models were attained for total saturate content [standard error of performance (SEP = 1.10%); coefficient of determination on the validation set (r² = 0.77)], palmitic (SEP = 0.94%; r² = 0.69), unsaturate (SEP = 1.13%; r² = 0.77), and oleic (SEP = 0.97; r² = 0.78). Prediction of other individual saturated and unsaturated FAs was less accurate with an r² range of 0.10 to 0.53. However, the sum of individual predicted saturated and unsaturated FA was acceptable compared with the reference method (SEP = 1.10 and 1.12%, respectively). This study shows that NIR can be used to predict accurately total fatty acids in M. Longissimus dorsi muscle.