**4. Conclusions and outlook**

Guar and locust bean gums are galactomannans with similar chemical structure because only the galactose/mannose ratio differentiates them. Depending on the geographic origins of seeds and their industrial manufacturing process, this ratio can be a variable and improves certain variability in their chemical composition, weakly discernible according to the analytical techniques used to characterize these gums. Despite the similarity of the infrared spectral signatures of guar and locust bean gums and the overlapping of IR bands due to inter- and intramolecular interactions, this work showed the feasibility of using FTIR-ATR technique to discriminate GG and LBG with the help of chemometric treatments. Best results have been obtained with a variable selection in the anomeric spectral region (between 1450 and 650 cm<sup>−</sup><sup>1</sup> ) to differentiate gum samples using a principal component analysis and to predict the species origin with a partial least square regression. A particular approach has been proposed to quantify the proportion of gums in blends with a good accuracy with the advantage to detect an adulteration of LBG by GG from their spectral profiles. The Scheffé's simplex approach allowed taking into account the variability of the chemical composition of gum samples due to different environmental parameters and manufacturing processes and generating a lot of simulated blends to increase the robustness of LDA calibration model. The approach with computational blends is a rapid and a low cost way to generate an FTIR-ATR dataset used in favor of quality control and prediction of adulteration.

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**Author details**

Catherine Rébufa, Fabien Girard, Jacques Artaud and Nathalie Dupuy\* Aix Marseille Univ, Avignon Université, CNRS, IRD, IMBE, Marseille, France

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

\*Address all correspondence to: nathalie.dupuy@univ-amu.fr

provided the original work is properly cited.

*Discrimination by Infrared Spectroscopy: Application to Micronized Locust Bean and Guar Gums*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.87568*

*Discrimination by Infrared Spectroscopy: Application to Micronized Locust Bean and Guar Gums DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.87568*
