Spectroscopic determination of leaf chlorophyll content and color for genetic selection on Sassafras tzumu

Background Reflectance spectroscopy, like IR, VIS–NIR, combined with chemometric, has been widely used in plant leaf chemical analysis. But less studies have been made on the application of NIR reflectance spectroscopy to plant leaf color and pigments analysis and the possibility of using it for genetic breeding selection. Here, we examine the ability of NIR reflectance spectroscopy to determine the plant leaf color and chlorophyll content in Sassafras tzumu leaves and use the prediction results for genetic selection. Fresh and living tree leaves were used for NIR spectra collection, leaf color parameters (a*, b* and L*) and chlorophyll content were measured with standard analytical methods, partial least squares regression (PLSR) were used for model construction, the coefficient of determination (R2) [cross-validation (\({\text{R}}^{2}_{\text{CV}}\)) and validation (\({\text{R}}^{2}_{\text{V}}\))] and root mean square error (RMSE) [cross-validation (RMSECV) and validation (RMSEV)] were used for model performance evaluation, significant Multivariate Correlation algorithm was applied for model improvement, to find out the most important region related to the leaf color parameters and chlorophyll model, which have been simulated 100 times for accuracy estimation.