Quantification of chlorophyll content and classification of nontransgenic and transgenic tomato leaves using visible/near-infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy

Visible/near-infrared (vis/NIR) spectroscopy combined with multivariate analysis was used to quantify chlorophyll content in tomato leaves and classify tomato leaves with different genes. In this study, transgenic tomato leaves with antisense LeETR1 (n = 106) and their parent nontransgenic ones (n = 102) were measured in vis/NIR diffuse reflectance mode. Quantification of chlorophyll content was achieved by partial least-squares regression with a cross-validation prediction error equal to 2.87. Partial least-squares discriminant analysis was performed to classify leaves. The results show that differences between transgenic and nontransgenic tomato leaves do exist, and excellent classification can be obtained after optimizing spectral pretreatment. The classification accuracy can reach to 100% using the derivative of spectral data in the full and partial wavenumber range. These results demonstrate that vis/NIR spectroscopy together with chemometrics techniques could be used to quantify chlorophyll content and differentiate tomato leaves with different genes, which offers the benefit of avoiding time-consuming, costly, and laborious chemical and sensory analysis.