Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Multispectral Imaging for Fingerprinting of Aflatoxin-B Contaminated (Zea Mays L.) Seeds: a Preliminary Study

Cereal seeds safety may be compromised by the presence of toxic contaminants, such as aflatoxins. Besides being carcinogenic, they have other adverse health effects on humans and animals. In this preliminary study, we used two non-invasive optical techniques, optical fiber fluorescence spectroscopy and multispectral imaging (MSI), for discrimination of maize seeds naturally contaminated with aflatoxin B (AFB) from the uncontaminated seeds. The AFB-contaminated seeds exhibited a red shift of the emission maximum position compared to the control samples. Using linear discrimination analysis to analyse fluorescence data, classification accuracy of 100% was obtained to discriminate uncontaminated and AFB-contaminated seeds. The MSI analysis combined with a normalized canonical discriminant analysis, provided spectral and spatial patterns of the analysed seeds. The AFB-contaminated seeds showed a 7.9 to 9.6-fold increase in the seed reflectance in the VIS region, and 10.4 and 12.2-fold increase in the NIR spectral region, compared with the uncontaminated seeds. Thus the MSI method classified successfully contaminated from uncontaminated seeds with high accuracy. The results may have an impact on development of spectroscopic non-invasive methods for detection of AFs presence in seeds, providing valuable information for the assessment of seed adulteration in the field of food forensics and food safety.