FT-midIR determination of fatty acid profiles, including trans fatty acids, in bakery products after focused microwave-assisted Soxhlet extraction

A study of the feasibility of Fourier transform medium infrared spectroscopy (FT-midIR) for analytical determination of fatty acid profiles, including trans fatty acids, is presented. The training and validation sets—75% (102 samples) and 25% (36 samples) of the samples once the spectral outliers have been removed—to develop FT-midIR general equations, were built with samples from 140 commercial and home-made bakery products. The concentration of the analytes in the samples used for this study is within the typical range found in these kinds of products. Both sets were independent; thus, the validation set was only used for testing the equations. The criterion used for the selection of the validation set was samples with the highest number of neighbours and the most separation between them (H<0.6). Partial least squares regression and cross validation were used for multivariate calibration. The FT-midIR method does not require post-extraction manipulation and gives information about the fatty acid profile in two min. The 14:0, 16:0, 18:0, 18:1 and 18:2 fatty acids can be determined with excellent precision and other fatty acids with good precision according to the Shenk criteria, R ²≥0.90, SEP=1–1.5 SEL and R ²=0.70-0.89, SEP=2–3 SEL, respectively. The results obtained with the proposed method were compared with those provided by the conventional method based on GC-MS. At 95% significance level, the differences between the values obtained for the different fatty acids were within the experimental error. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available for this article at and is accessible for authorized users.