Our results show that front-face fluorescence spectroscopy coupled
with chemometric methods has great potential in the development of
rapid and non-destructive methods for the identification and characterization
of muscles. This method appears as a good tool for the identification
of different muscles, in particular, the emission spectra in the range
of 305–400 nm lead to 100% correct classification. Our results also show
the potential of this method to predict the textural properties of the
meat samples. However, the PLS regression applied to the spectral
data of the three muscles gave generally good R2C but low R2V.
This might have happened due to the fact that small number of
samples was used in this study. Consequently we suggest that large
number of samples must be used to confirm these findings in future
studies.