Patent ID: 7803625
Filing Date: 2010-09-28
Classification: G01N

Abstract:
1. A method for determining the nutritional quality of milk lipids, involving the steps consisting of considering a defined number of reference milk samples with known fatty acid profiles determined through gas phase chromatography; creating a database by subjecting said reference milk samples to mid-infrared radiation to obtain reference spectra and associating respectively said reference spectra to said known fatty acid profiles to develop calibrations, wherein the calibrations vary in accuracy from one fatty acid to another, and wherein the calibrations comprise satisfactory calibrations from major fatty acids in the known fatty acid profiles; subjecting a test milk sample to be analyzed for lipid nutritional quality to mid-infrared radiation to obtain a sample spectrum; comparing said sample spectrum to the reference spectra to infer a sample fatty acid profile, wherein said sample fatty acid profile is limited to percentages of the major fatty acids in the known fatty acid profiles with satisfactory calibrations; developing prediction equations to correlate the percentages of the major fatty acids in the known fatty acid profiles with satisfactory calibrations to percentages of minor fatty acids in the known fatty acid profiles; and predicting percentages of minor fatty acids in the test milk sample using the prediction equations and the sample fatty acid profile.