Elsevier

LWT

Volume 127, June 2020, 109427
LWT

Simultaneous determination of goat milk adulteration with cow milk and their fat and protein contents using NIR spectroscopy and PLS algorithms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lwt.2020.109427Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Identification and quantification of goat milk adulteration by adding cow milk.

  • Fat and protein content quantifications in goat and cow milk and their mixtures.

  • NIR spectroscopy coupled with different preprocessing techniques and PLS algorithms.

  • PLS-DA classified correctly non-adulterated goat and cow milk, and their mixtures.

  • Good quantifications for adulteration and fat by iSPA-PLS and for protein by PLS.

Abstract

This work employed NIR spectroscopy and PLS algorithms for the identification and quantification of goat milk adulteration by adding cow milk, besides the determination of their fat and protein contents. Since cow milk can represent a health risk to allergic consumers regardless its amount, PLS-DA was able to identify cow milk additions in goat milk as low as 1.0154 g/100g, likewise the non-adulterated goat and cow milk samples, achieving a 100% of correct classification. For quantification purposes, the Successive Projections Algorithm for interval selection in PLS (iSPA-PLS) provided the best results for the determination of both adulteration and fat contents, while PLS gave better results for the protein quantification. Despite the great similarity of both natural dairy matrices and their intrinsic variability, the prediction results provided suitable values with high correlation coefficients and low RMSEP and REP values, with RPD values higher than 3. Therefore, the proposed methodology proved to be a useful, fast and non-destructive tool for screening the quality of goat milk in terms of its adulteration with cow milk, in addition to the quantification of its fat and protein contents.

Introduction

World goat milk production surpassed 18 million tonnes per year in 2017, accumulating an increase of approximately 20% in a decade (2007–2017) (FAOSTAT, 2018). This is due in part to the growing consumer interest in this product and its derivatives, motivated by the unique characteristics of goat milk when compared to cow milk, such as low allergenicity, high digestibility and functional properties (Ahmed, El-Bassiony, Elmalt, & Ibrahim, 2015; Hodgkinson et al., 2012).

From the economic point of view, goat milk is more expensive than cow milk and, consequently, its derivatives have a higher added value. Thus, driven by this economic representativeness, adulteration of this food type is a reality. The most fraud is in the replacement category, where there is a partial or total substitution of a food constituent by one or more substitutes (i.e. one adulterant or a mixture of adulterants) of lower cost without the knowledge of consumers. The main adulterant found in goat milk and its derivatives is cow milk, due to its lower cost and greater abundance (Azad & Ahmed, 2016; Dabrowska et al., 2010; Di Pinto et al., 2017).

Considering the similarity of these matrices and, consequently, the difficulty of identifying them in mixtures, chromatographic methods, immunological tests, electrophoretic techniques and DNA identification are currently used to determine this kind of adulteration (Di Pinto et al., 2017; Kamal & Karoui, 2015; Pesic et al., 2011; Song, Xue, & Han, 2011). However, such techniques have some drawbacks such as: high cost, time-consuming, laborious and requiring various steps of sample pretreatment.

In this scenario, non-destructive methodologies like Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) have represented an important, interesting and promising alternative for the detection of adulteration with cheaper substituents in different types of foods (Shao, Xuan, Hu, & Wang, 2019), especially for cow milk and its derivatives (Azad & Ahmed, 2016). The increase in the popularity of this technique can be attributed to its main characteristics: nondestructive, absence of sample pretreatment, rapidity and accuracy. In comparison with other methodologies based on vibrational spectroscopy (FTIR and RAMAN, for example), the recent advances in the NIR instrumentation, including portable, low-cost and easy-to-use devices, coupled with the construction of the qualitative and quantitative libraries of chemometric models is becoming this technique a reliable, efficient and accessible tool that can be widely employed for different applications in scientific research and industries (Lohumi, Lee, Lee, & Cho, 2015; Pasquini, 2018).

Despite all the methodological advantages, NIR spectroscopy has its limitations, mainly with regard to the sensibility of the technique, which also depends on certain operational and environmental factors, such as the variability of the matrix and the physical state of the sample (Dupont, Croguennec, & Pochet, 2018; Pasquini, 2018). The main sources of variability of milk from various species that affect its chemical composition include race, feed, breeding system (extensive and intensive), lactation period, environmental conditions, age and animal health status (Nagy et al., 2019; McDermott et al., 2017; Manousidis et al., 2018; Miloradovic, Miocinovic, Kljajevic, Tomasevic, & Pudja, 2018).

Classification models based on NIR spectroscopy developed in different studies have already demonstrated the high predictive capacity for the determination of different adulterants in cow milk, and addition of milk from other species in camel milk too (Chen et al., 2017; Mabood et al., 2017a, 2017b; Karunathilaka, Yakes, He, Chung, & Massoba, 2018). However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no reports on the application of NIR spectroscopy for the determination of goat milk adulteration by adding cow milk.

Since in typical NIR spectra exhibit a redundancy of the recorded data due to the strong correlation over the different analytical channels, it has been very useful the use the noise-reduction properties of Partial Least Squares (PLS) combined with the discard of non-informative or redundant variables. In such scenario, Interval PLS (iPLS) and the Successive Projections Algorithm for interval selection in PLS regression (iSPA-PLS) have been successfully employed to improve the performance of the regression models, generating more stable models with superior interpretability, and fewer prediction errors. The iSPA-PLS algorithm is an extension of SPA that can select multiple intervals of variables, instead the selection of one interval alone as in iPLS, which can eventually not contain the required analytical information to solve the problem under study (Diniz, Pistonesi, & Araújo, 2015; Gomes, Galvão, Araújo, Véras, & Silva, 2013; Krepper et al., 2018). It is important to highlight that NIR and iSPA-PLS have already been successfully employed in food analysis for determining protein content in wheat and extract concentration in beer (Gomes, Galvão, Araújo, Véras, & Silva, 2013), moisture and total polyphenols in tea (Diniz, Pistonesi, & Araújo, 2015), total anthocyanins in jaboticaba fruit (Mariani, Teixeira, Lima, Morgensten, Nardini, & Cunha Júnior, 2015) and fat content in chicken hamburgers (Krepper et al., 2018).

This study is focused on the identification and quantification of goat milk adulteration by adding cow milk, besides the determination of their fat and protein contents employing NIR spectroscopy and PLS algorithms. For classification aims, considering both the economic losses and the potential health risk to allergic consumers regardless of the amount of cow milk ingested, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) were tested to differentiate adulterated samples from the pure ones (i.e. non-adulterated goat and cow milk). For quantification, full-spectrum PLS, iPLS and iSPA-PLS have been employed and then compared.

Section snippets

Samples

In order to construct a representative model containing different variability sources of the raw materials, 7 lots with 18 samples of goat milk and 7 lots with 18 samples of bovine milk were acquired between November 2017 to June 2018 from different farmers located in the micro-regions Agreste and Sertão of the Paraíba and Pernambuco states, Brazil. The flocks were composed of pure and mestizo animals of different ages with different farrowing number and lactation stages maintained in extensive

Spectra investigation and pre-processing procedures

In order to eliminate noise and systematic variations on the baseline, NIR spectra (Fig. 1) were initially preprocessed with 13-point moving mean and then with different preprocessing methods (SNV; MSC; LBC; LBC-BO; and BO) before the construction of PLS, iPLS and iSPA-PLS models.

As can be seen, a prominent and broad band around 6900 cm−1 (the first overtone of O–H stretching vibration) has been attributed to water. The band at 5000 cm−1 has been associated with protein as amide, besides

Conclusions

In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of NIR spectroscopy in the identification and quantification of adulteration of goat milk by the addition of cow milk, despite the high complexity in determining one dairy matrix into another. The use of pre-processed NIR spectra coupled with interval selection by iSPA-PLS provided the best results for the determination of both adulteration and fat contents, while PLS gave better results for the protein quantification. The good performances obtained

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Elainy Virginia dos Santos Pereira: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. David Douglas de Sousa Fernandes: Software, Formal analysis, Validation, Data curation, Writing - original draft. Mário César Ugulino de Araújo: Resources, Funding acquisition. Paulo Henrique Gonçalves Dias Diniz: Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Data curation, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Maria Inês

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Prof. Dr. Mário Araújo for using the NIR spectrometry facilities and the NUPEA-UEPB laboratory for supporting all reference analysis. The authors also thank to CAPRIBOV cooperative and all farmers that provided the milk samples. David Fernandes and Mário Araújo gratefully acknowledge CNPq Brazil for their research fellowships.

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