Rapid and non-destructive screening of seed components in domesticated pennycress using near-infrared spectroscopy

Domesticated pennycress ( Thlaspi arvense L.), a newly winter annual oilseed crop grown in the Upper Midwestern USA, has garnered significant interest because of its high seed oil content. Compared to native field pennycress, domesticated varieties possess improved agronomic and compositional properties that allow grain and meal to be used as an animal feed ingredient. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a well-established, non-destructive method for rapidly analyzing seed composition, however NIRS has been challenging to utilize in native field pennycress because of the limited natural variation in the seed composition does not allow the development of robust NIRS calibration equations. Domesticated pennycress exhibits notable differences in certain seed composition components and using this variation we observed moderate to strong correlations between the wet lab analyses and NIRS predictions for fourteen traits evaluated. For moisture, crude fat, protein, and sinigrin content, coefficient of determination (r 2 ) between wet lab values and the NIRS predictions were 0.98, 0.96, 0.97 and 0.94 respectively. For fatty acid content, moderate r 2 for oleic acid (0.87), linoleic acid (0.69), linolenic acid (0.88) and erucic acid (0.87) were observed. Additionally, a comparison of grain samples harvested in 2024 was made for results from the NIRS equations and standard laboratory methods executed by external analytical laboratories. These results collectively demonstrate that NIRS is an effective tool for compositional analysis of seed components of domesticated pennycress and can serve as a substitute for more time-consuming analytical methods. • Using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for domesticated pennycress seed analysis. • Using gene-editing, analyte spiking, seed mixing to make analytes variation. • Analyzing moisture, sinigrin, crude fat and erucic acid from 1 g intact seeds. • Assessing commercial grain quality by Non-destructive NIRS.