Rapid Capillary Electrophoresis for detection of food fraud in buffalo dairy products

In ltaly water buffalo's milk and their derivatives have a great economie relevance, therefore, it is very important to defend the quality of buffalo mozzarella cheese characterized by Protected Designation of Origin. Severa] methods have been developed to assess the authenticity of dairy products[1] and, among these, capillary electrophoresis (CE) was able to quantify cow milk in ovine/bovine milk mixture in rapid manner[2]. The aim ofthis study was to use an automatic CE instrument to create a robust and rapid method allowing to predict the concentration of bovine milk added to buffalo milk and in their derivatives. Buffalo and bovine bulk milk samples and buffalo and bovine mozzarella cheese were provided by herds and cheese factories located in Calabria (ltaly). Whey for milk, and exudate for mozzarella cheese, were used to prepare two distinct standard sample sets by mixing buffalo with bovine whey or exudate (from O to 100%) resulting in a total of225 standards (188 whey and 37 exudates). By analysis of milk whey and mozzarella exudate electropherograms we identified in each of two dataset a different reproducible peak by which were obtained the following regression equations: %bovine in whey = 9.4 * (peak area)- 18.2, R2 = 0.97; %bovine in exudate = -4,6 *(peak area)+ 127.7, R2 = 0.95. The results of this study confrrm that CE analysis can be a good candidate to develop a rapid and reliable method to identify and quantify buffalo milk and mozzarella cheese adulterations with bovine milk.