Mid-Infrared (MIR) Spectroscopy for the quantitative detection of cow’s milk in buffalo milk

Anna Antonella Spina¹^,^*, Carlotta Ceniti¹^,^**, Cristian Piras¹, Bruno Tilocca¹, Domenico Britti¹, Valeria Maria Morittu¹

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¹Interdepartmental Services Centre of Veterinary for Human and Animal Health, Department of Health Science, Magna Græcia University, Catanzaro 88100, Italy.

^**Corresponding Author: Anna Antonella Spina, Interdepartmental Services Centre of Veterinary for Human and Animal Health, Department of Health Science, Magna Græcia University, Catanzaro 88100, Italy. E-mail: aa.spina@unicz.it.

^**Corresponding Author: Carlotta Ceniti, Interdepartmental Services Centre of Veterinary for Human and Animal Health, Department of Health Science, Magna Græcia University, Catanzaro 88100, Italy. E-mail: ceniti@unicz.it.

© Copyright 2022 Korean Society of Animal Science and Technology. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In Italy, buffalo mozzarella is a largely sold and consumed dairy product. The fraudulent adulteration of buffalo milk with cheaper and more available milk of other species is very frequent. In the current study, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, in combination with multivariate analysis by partial least square (PLS) regression, was applied to quantitatively detect the adulteration of buffalo milk with cow milk. To enhance the heterogeneity, cow and buffalo bulk milk was collected for a period of over three years from different dairy farms. A total of 119 samples were used for the analysis to generate 17 different concentrations of buffalo-cow milk mixtures. This procedure was used to enhance variability and to properly randomize the trials. The obtained calibration model showed an R2 ≥ 0.98 (R2cal.=0.99861; RMSEC=2.04; R2val.=0.99803; RMSEP=2.84; RMSECV=2.44) suggesting that this method could be successfully applied in the dairy industry as a rapid and cost-effective screening for detecting and quantifying the adulteration of buffalo milk with cow’s milk.

Keywords: Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy; adulteration; buffalo milk