Rapid dough making quality analysis of wheat flour using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics

Current methods for measuring wheat quality and dough rheology in the later stages of wheat breeding programs, including extensographs and farinographs, are costly and time-consuming. There is a significant interest in the Australian wheat industry for developing non-destructive, field-based, rapid dough-making quality assessment methods for Australian wheat varieties throughout earlier and later stages of the wheat breeding process. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is a valuable tool for analysis and quality control in the food industry as it is a simple and rapid technique requiring no sample pre-treatment before analysis. We aimed to investigate the application of FTIR spectroscopy coupled with partial least squares (PLSR) regression data analysis to rapidly assess wheat flour's dough-making quality. Results indicated that using FTIR data, PLSR could be applied to accurately predict multiple dough-making qualities, including protein content, extensibility, water absorption, dough development time (DDT), dough stability, and maximum resistance to tension (R_max). FTIR spectroscopy could not only be used to accurately predict the dough making quality of wheat lines from an in-sample test dataset, but this method also outperformed genetic predictive analysis, an established quality-prediction method in wheat breeding, in predicting dough making quality using out-of-sample data.