Application of MATLAB package for the automation of the chemometric processing of spectrometric signals in the analysis of complex mixtures

Abstract

We describe three types of automatic software for the chemometric processing of spectrometric data. The software was developed in the MATLAB working environment and includes data import, mathematical preprocessing, chemometric analysis, and generation of a report file. The software is designed to solve problems regarding identification of some components of multicomponent mixtures, determination of compounds with overlapping signals, and differentiation of samples by their spectral responses. To test the software, we present examples of spectrometric analyses of coffee, fruit juices, and alcoholic beverages using chemometric methods of independent component analysis (ICA) and partial least squares–discriminant analysis (PLS–DA). In particular, we simulated electronic absorption spectra for the identification of three artificial colors (E110, E102, and E122) in alcoholic beverages, NMR spectra for the simultaneous determination of five components (acetic acid, γ-aminobutyric acid, arginine, acetaldehyde, and proline) in orange juice without using reference standards, and NMR spectra of coffee samples to determine its varietal authenticity (Arabica or Robusta). The duration of automatic chemometric processing did not exceed 1 min per sample. The developed software can be optimized for other matrices and/or brands of spectrometers.