A novel approach to discriminate Lycium barbarum from the Zhongning area using FT-IR spectroscopy and chemometrics

Abstract

An increasing number of fake and inferior Lycium barbarum fruits from the Zhongning production area have appeared in the market due to large demands of consumers. The present study focused on the classification and identification of Zhongning Lycium barbarum (ZNL) from different production areas using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics. Results revealed that the spectral region between 1909–1311 cm⁻¹ was found to be useful for both classification and identification of ZNL. FT-IR combined with discriminant analysis (DA) and soft independent modeling of class analogy were used for classification and identification of ZNL among different Lycium production areas in China. Also, FT-IR coupled with DA can successfully classify and identify ZNL from the other production areas. Recognition rates of the calibration and validation sets were 94.0% and 100%, respectively. Thus, the proposed method is a useful tool to identify ZNL among different Lycium production areas in China.