Vol. 26 No. 1 January/February 2015 15 articles Near infrared spectroscopy, a diverse analytical tool with unlimited potential for discoveries! Hormoz Azizian, a John K.G. Kramer b and Magdi M. Mossoba c a NIR Technologies, Oakville, ON, Canada. E-mail: hazizian@nirtechnologies.com b Retired from Guelph Food Research Center, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Guelph, ON, Canada. E-mail: jkgkramer@rogers.com c United States Food and Drug Administration, College Park, MD 20740, USA. E-mail: Magdi.Mossoba@fda.hhs.gov R ecently, we randomly down- loaded a copy of this Newslet- ter titled “A Celebration of Near Infrared Spectroscopy” pub- lished in 2005. It is totally a coincidence that our first NIR publication titled “A Rapid Method for the Quantification of Fatty Acids in Fats and Oils with Emphasis on trans Fatty Acids Using Fourier Transform Near Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-NIR)” was also published in Lipids in 2005. When we read how Karl Norris described the first develop- ment of NIR instruments and the discovery that they could be used to measure not only the moisture content but also protein and fat contents of grains and oilseeds, and we look at our research over the last decade, we realise how far and how fast NIR spec- troscopy has come. Back in 2010, when Peter Griffiths asked us to write a chapter for a book titled Applications of Vibrational Spectroscopy in Food Science, we decided to use the title “Progression to Fatty Acid Profiling of Edible Fats and Oils Using Vibra- tional Spectroscopy” which was a reflection of how far NIR has progressed from its early days of testing moisture, fat and protein to analysing the complete fatty acid (FA) com- position present in an oil or fat sample down to 0.15%, as a percentage of total FAs. When Gerard Downey invited us to write an article for NIR news we were happy to do so but we were not sure what to write about. However, the above article inspired us to share some of the interesting and most rewarding NIR research that we have been engaged in over the past decade. Peter Flinn in the celebration issue described exactly why NIR is such an extremely versa- tile analytical technique. Because we as NIR spectroscopists do not isolate and charac- terise specific matrix components, we are forced to take a different approach by ana- lysing differences in relationships between test samples that are based on specific components. This is why we always use the term “matrix dependency” in our dis- cussions because NIR measures the whole sample and does not have the luxury to selectively remove or ignore any compo- nent from the whole. Over the last decade, we have experi- enced first-hand how versatile NIR spec- troscopy has been as an analytical tool. Whether it was the application of NIR spectroscopy to the identification of elec- tric cable insulation materials in nuclear power plant containment (which by some estimates resulted in millions of dollars of savings in replacement costs) or the deter- mination of FA composition in fats and oils (which was recently approved by the AOCS as a Standard Procedure, Cd 14f-14, that will appear online soon), or even in tackling obesity in humans by accurately monitoring body composition, specifically the fat con- tent. For the first time, this latter application was more recently extended to demon- strate that the body composition of preg- nant women could be accurately monitored non-invasively and with no health risk to the mother to help monitor the health sta- tus of the expectant mother and her baby. When Karl Norris made the discovery that NIR spectroscopy could be used to mea- sure the moisture, protein and oil content in grains and oilseeds from the same NIR data, he could not have imagined the extent of applications this powerful analytical tool has unleashed! We owe a great deal of appreciation to Karl Norris for leading the way to this discovery. We will describe the applications mentioned above which prove that new discoveries can be made using the same NIR spectral information with different chemometric approaches! Nuclear power plant application What was unique about this application was that the measurement of electric cable insu- lation materials had to be non-destructive, non-intrusive and made using a portable technology capable of taking measure- ments on site, perhaps using fibre optics! A tall order by any stretch of the imagination! Against the odds, we were successful and millions of dollars were saved in cable replacement costs. Our initial discovery showed that different cable insulation mate- rials produced different NIR fingerprints, which was the key to solving the problem. Once again, as Peter Flinn pointed out, unlike traditional analyses, there was no need to isolate any specific component(s) or remove cables for testing. All we did was analyse the specific cable and compare it to the respective original cable insulation material based on the NIR absorption prop- erties. If there was a match to a qualified cable insulation, the cable did not need to be replaced. However, as any NIR spec- troscopist knows, we had to develop and validate new identification and classification models that covered all the types of cable insulation materials with their different for- mulations. We achieved this task by scan- ning and analysing as many cable insulation materials as we could obtain either from storage, suppliers or unused cable insula- tion materials from the field. This proved to be a successful project and it was eventu- ally field tested, validated and put through a rigorous technical audit before this novel NIR methodology was approved for use in the field. We had determined that the major- ity of cable insulation materials belonged to one of 65 different known types. Destructive tests had commenced on all these types of insulations and we were able to re-examine and evaluate them. Based on the accept- able reference destructive test results, most of these samples were deemed to be satisfactory based on NIR results, and replacement costs, which were estimated to be in the range of millions of dollars, were avoided. Figure 1 shows the technical staff in complete plastic suits scanning the cable insulation materials inside a nuclear reactor containment. Fatty acid analysis The key to this development was the avail- ability of accurate gas chromatography doi: 10.1255/nirn.1503