[On-site evaluation of raw milk qualities by portable Vis/NIR transmittance technique]

To ensure the material safety of dairy products, visible (Vis)/near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with che- mometrics methods was used to develop models for fat, protein, dry matter (DM) and lactose on-site evaluation. A total of 88 raw milk samples were collected from individual livestocks in different years. The spectral of raw milk were measured by a porta- ble Vis/NIR spectrometer with diffused transmittance accessory. To remove the scatter effect and baseline drift, the diffused transmittance spectra were preprocessed by 2nd order derivative with Savitsky-Golay (polynomial order 2, data point 25). Changeable size moving window partial least squares (CSMWPLS) and genetic algorithms partial least squares (GAPLS) meth- ods were suggested to select informative regions for PLS calibration. The PLS and multiple linear regression (MLR) methods were used to develop models for predicting quality index of raw milk. The prediction performance of CSMWPLS models were similar to GAPLS models for fat, protein, DM and lactose evaluation, the root mean standard errors of prediction (RMSEP) were 0.115 6/0.103 3, 0.096 2/0.113 7, 0.201 3/0.123 7 and 0.077 4/0.066 8, and the relative standard deviations of prediction (RPD) were 8.99/10.06, 3.53/2.99, 5.76/9.38 and 1.81/2.10, respectively. Meanwhile, the MLR models were also cal- ibrated with 8, 10, 9 and 7 variables for fat, protein, DM and lactose, respectively. The prediction performance of MLR models was better than or close to PLS models. The MLR models to predict fat, protein, DM and lactose yielded the RMSEP of 0.107 0, 0.093 0, 0.136 0 and 0.065 8, and the RPD of 9.72, 3.66, 8.53 and 2.13, respectively. The results demonstrated the usefulness of Vis/NIR spectra combined with multivariate calibration methods as an objective and rapid method for the quality evaluation of complicated raw milks. And the results obtained also highlight the potential of portable Vis/NIR instruments for on-site assessing quality indexes of raw milk.