High-Throughput Chemometric Quality Assessment of Extra Virgin Olive Oils Using a Microtiter Plate Reader

A commercially available microtiter plate reader was applied as a high-throughput counterpart of ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometer to identify the producing location of extra virgin olive oils (EVOOs). Multiplicative scatter correction and the first derivative was used to denoise the UV-Vis spectra and eliminate the effects of background drift. The spectra were analyzed using chemometrics methods including the principal component analysis (PCA) and the partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The PLS-DA model on full spectra using 5 latent variables showed a classification accuracy of 97.92% by cross-validation. The overall results demonstrated that the use of a UV-Vis spectrophotometer based on the microtiter plate reader combined with chemometrics can be applied to the quality assessment of EVOOs. It is demonstrated that the microtiter plate reader can be a high-throughput tool in the quality assessment of food ingredients.