Cereal Chem 66:439-444   |  VIEW ARTICLE

Computerized Wheat Varietal Identification by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography.

M. G. Scanlon, H. D. Sapirstein, and W. Bushuk. Copyright 1989 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

A computerized library search procedure is described to perform wheat varietal identification based on reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) of gliadins. Normalized peak retention times and relative peak heights (percent basis) comprise the chromatogram fingerprint and were used in the library search as primary and secondary discrimination parameters, respectively. The computer scores peaks as being matched if both the retention time and relative peak heights of compared components are within prescribed difference thresholds. Objective strategies for determining these optimum thresholds using a library of replicate chromatograms are described. The use of a weighted matching procedure in the search minimized the effect of mismatching small peaks, whose retention times may be altered by noise and peak slope changes. The variety discriminatory power of the program using RP-HPLC is equal to that obtained by standard electrophoretic methods and has the advantage that it is totally automated, requiring no subjective input.