Rapid detection of milk adulteration using intact protein flow injection mass spectrometric fingerprints combined with chemometrics

- Flow injection mass spectrometry with chemometrics detected milk adulteration.
- Each measurement took only 1 min.
- Detected soybean, pea, and whey protein isolates at levels as low as 0.5% (w/w).
- Built automatic chemometrics classification models with 100% correct validation.
- Compared with conventional raw and charge state deconvolution processed spectra.

Flow injection mass spectrometry (FIMS) combined with chemometrics was evaluated for rapidly detecting economically motivated adulteration (EMA) of milk. Twenty-two pure milk and thirty-five counterparts adulterated with soybean, pea, and whey protein isolates at 0.5, 1, 3, 5, and 10% (w/w) levels were analyzed. The principal component analysis (PCA), partial least-squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and support vector machine (SVM) classification models indicated that the adulterated milks could successfully be classified from the pure milks. FIMS combined with chemometrics might be an effective method to detect possible EMA in milk.