Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is well-established for the quality testing of early-generation material in plant breeding programs (Osborne, 2006). In current usage, however, it is applied to the testing of bulk samples and does not provide information on the distribution of the values of a given quality trait within a sample. On the other hand, measurement of NIR spectra of individual grains (Single-Kernel NIR Spectroscopy - SK-NIR) would enable the assessment of the uniformity of samples with respect to a given property. SK-NIR was first described by Finney and Norris (1978). Since then, a number of papers have reported SK-NIR sample presentation systems using various commercial NIR instruments (Abe et al, 1996; Baye et al, 2006; de Sa and Palmer, 2006; Delwiche, 1993; Delwiche and Massie, 1996; Delwiche et al, 2006; Nielsen et al, 2003; Osborne et al, 1993; Rittiron et al, 2004; Shadow and Carrasco, 2000; Wesley et al, 2007). Several researchers have also recognised the potential of SK-NIR tosort grains into fractions that differentiate the sample with respect to some property. Most recently, Dowell et al (2006) have described a prototype system for sorting grain automatically according to certain quality characteristics.
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