Indirect Measurement of ß-Glucan Content in Barley Grain with Near-Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy.

ABSTRACT

ß-Glucan is a component of barley grains with functional properties that make it useful for human consumption. Cultivars with high grain ß-glucan are required for industrial processing. Breeding for barley genotypes with higher ß-glucan content requires a high-throughput method to assess ß-glucan quickly and cheaply. Wet-chemistry laboratory procedures are low-throughput and expensive, but indirect measurement methods such as near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) match the breeding requirements (once the NIR spectrometer is available). A predictive model for the indirect measurement of ß-glucan content in ground barley grains with NIRS was therefore developed using 248 samples with a wide range of ß-glucan contents (3.4%-17.6%). To develop such calibration, 198 unique samples were used for training and 50 for validation. The predictive model had R2 = 0.990, bias = 0.013% and RMSEP = 0.327% for validation. NIRS was confirmed to be a very useful technique for indirect measurement of ß-glucan content and evaluation of high-ß-glucan barleys.