Fruits were placed at each-calyx axis set to the horizontal position. On each fruit, two opposite spectra were captured and the average of the two spectra was used (for the development of the models). Soluble solids content (SSC) was determined with a digital refractometer (PR-101 ATAGO, Norfolk, VA) with temperature compensation. SSC was expressed in °Brix. Titratable acidity (TA), determined by titration up to pH 8.1 with 0.1 N NaOH, was expressed in

mmol H+·100 g−1 of fresh weight (FW). PCA (principal component analysis) was initially performed using all available samples (n = 61 for passion fruit; n = 150 for tomato and n = 116 for apricot) in order to evaluate the variability among the samples, to eliminate the aberrant SCH727965 mouse spectra due to acquisition problems and to separate groups for calibration and internal validation. Samples to be used for both calibration click here and internal validation sets were selected solely on the basis of spectral data, following the method proposed by Shenk and Westerhaus (1991) which uses the pre-processing mean centering and ensures that all results will

be interpretable in terms of variation around the mean. It is recommended for all practical applications ( Nicolai et al., 2007). Spectral preprocessing techniques were used to remove any irrelevant information that could not be handled properly by the regression techniques. Several preprocessing methods have been applied for this purpose. Smoothing techniques removed random noise from near infrared spectra, while MSC (multiple scatter correction) was used to compensate additive (baseline shift) and multiplicative effects in the spectral data, that are induced by physical effects, such as the non-uniform scattering throughout the spectrum as the dependence of scattering degree on radiation wavelength, particle size and refractive index (Nicolai et al., 2007). In order to generate the prediction models for the quality traits of interest, the samples were grouped into two sets to have 80% samples Bumetanide for calibration and 20% for internal validation (Table 1). It is worthwhile to

point out that internal validation samples were not utilized in calibration and cross validation steps, in order to avoid overfitting. The MatLab software package (version 6.5, Mathworks, USA) and Origin 6.1® (OriginLab Inc., Northampton, USA) was used for the chemometric treatment of the data. Partial least squares (PLS) regression models were built for the prediction of SSC and TA, using the spectral data (matrix X) and measurements carried out through the use of reference methods (matrix Y). In PLS, both the spectral matrix X and the reference data in the matrix Y were used for the calibration. To determine the optimal number of latent variables (LV), internal cross-validation method was applied; through the routine “Leave one out”.