The employment of FTIR spectroscopy in combination with chemometrics for analysis of rat meat in meatball formulation.

For Indonesian community, meatball is one of the favorite meat food products. In order to gain economical benefits, the substitution of beef meat with rat meat can happen due to the different prices between rat meat and beef. In this present research, the feasibility of FTIR spectroscopy in combination with multivariate calibration of partial least square (PLS) was used for the quantitative analysis of rat meat in the binary mixture of beef in meatball formulation. Meanwhile, the chemometrics of principal component analysis (PCA) was used for the classification between rat meat and beef meatballs. Some frequency regions in mid infrared region were optimized, and finally, the frequency region of 750-1000 cm(-1) was selected during PLS and PCA modeling.For quantitative analysis, the relationship between actual values (x-axis) and FTIR predicted values (y-axis) of rat meat is described by the equation of y= 0.9417x+ 2.8410 with coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.993, and root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) of 1.79%. Furthermore, PCA was successfully used for the classification of rat meat meatball and beef meatball.