Milk Adulteration: Detecting Species-Specific Proteins by LC/MS

One of the simplest forms of milk adulteration is to dilute more expensive milks from species, such as sheep and buffalo, with less expensive cow milk. In this application note, a method was developed for measuring the addition of bovine milk to more expensive milks (goat, sheep, buffalo and camel) by using liquid chromatography coupled to electrospray time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-TOF MS) to detect species-specific marker proteins in the milk.