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Title: CHARACTERIZATION OF VISIBLE SPECTRAL INTENSITY VARIATIONS OF WHOLESOME AND UNWHOLESOME CHICKEN MEATS WITH TWO-DIMENSIONAL CORRELATION SPECTROSOPY

Author
item LIU, YONGLIANG - VISITING SCIENTIST-CHINA
item Chen, Yud
item OZAKI, YUKIHIRO - KWANSEI-GAKUIN UNIV/JAPAN

Submitted to: Journal of Applied Spectroscopy
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/2/1999
Publication Date: 4/1/2000
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: To ensure a healthy and safe meat supply to the consumers, U.S. legislation requires that poultry carcasses to be sold to markets should be inspected in the processing plants by Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors. Visual and manual inspection on-line by inspectors is prone to human error and day-to-day individual inspector variations. The Instrumentation and Sensing Laboratory has developed a visible/near-infrared (NIR) spectrophotometer system for on-line, real-time inspection of poultry carcasses. Adoption of this technology will reduce the workload of the inspectors in processing lines, improve the effectiveness of the U.S. federal safety inspection program, and increase the productivity of processing plants. In order to further improve the robustness of the system, we studied the fundamental visible/NIR spectral features of both wholesome and unwholesome meats, by applying the newly-developed two-dimensional (2D) correlation technique. The results of this study not only improve the scientific understanding of various forms of myoglobin - a major pigment in meat, but also enable us to confirm the spectral band origins observed in the previous study of cooked meats. This fundamental study of spectral band origins strengthened the scientific-base of the automated poultry inspection system. Researchers working on visible spectroscopy of food, medical, and agricultural products will benefit from the findings of this research.

Technical Abstract: Generalized two-dimensional (2D) correlation analysis of visible spectra (400 - 700 nm) was performed to characterize the spectral intensity variations of wholesome and five different classes of unwholesome chicken meats. The meats were obtained from chicken carcasses that were judged to be wholesome or condemned by a Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) veterinarian at a poultry processing plant. The unwholesome carcasses were condemned either because they were improperly bled (cadaver) or showed a disease symptom, such as air-sacculitis, ascites, septicemia, or tumors. The results showed that there are at least three prominent bands around 445, 485, and 560 nm that could be attributed to deoxymyoglobin, metmyoglobin, and oxymyoglobin absorption, respectively. The results also demonstrated that deoxymyoglobin, metmyoglobin, and oxymyoglobin components coexist in all meats; there is, however, a clear indication that tthere were more variations in oxymyoglobin and deoxymyoglobin and less variations in metmyoglobin in the wholesome and cadaver meats than in the diseased meats. The asynchronous spectral analysis of the wholesome and unwholesome meats revealed that the spectral intensity change at the 485 nm band occurs later than those of the 445 and 560 nm bands. It indicates that metmyoglobin, the degraded species of both the deoxymyoglobin and oxymyoglobin, mainly existed in the diseased meats.