High-throughput chemometric quality assessment of extra virgin olive oils using a microtiter plate reader

Abstract

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.