External cavity-quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL) spectroscopy for protein analysis in bovine milk

•Mid-infrared (IR) External Cavity-Quantum Cascade Laser (EC-QCL) spectroscopy.•Determination of casein, α-lactalbumin, β-lactoglobulin and total protein.•Protein quantitation in bovine milk samples using the mid-IR amide I band.•Science based calibration (SBC) for compensating the background matrix signal.•Quantitation without sample treatment within minutes time.

The analytical determination of bovine milk proteins is important in food and non-food industrial applications and yet, rather labour-intensive wet-chemical, low-throughput methods have been employed since decades. This work proposes the use of external cavity-quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL) spectroscopy for the simultaneous quantification of the most abundant bovine milk proteins and the total protein content based on the chemical information contained in mid-infrared (IR) spectral features of the amide I band. Mid-IR spectra of protein standard mixtures were used for building partial least squares (PLS) regression models. Protein concentrations in commercial bovine milk samples were calculated after chemometric compensation of the matrix contribution employing science-based calibration (SBC) without sample pre-processing. The use of EC-QCL spectroscopy together with advanced multivariate data analysis allowed the determination of casein, α-lactalbumin, β-lactoglobulin and total protein content within several minutes.

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