Technical note: Nontargeted detection of adulterated plant proteins in raw milk by UPLC-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometric proteomics combined with chemometrics

We built and validated a chemometric model to detect possible milk adulteration with plant proteins. Specifically, we extracted proteins in raw milk, treated with tryptic digestion, and obtained peptide fingerprints by UPLC-quadrupole time-of-flight-mass spectrometry with proteomics to differentiate authentic milks from their counterparts adulterated with nonmilk proteins. This approach is able to detect soybean and pea powder-adulterated milks at as low as 1% (wt/wt). Additionally, we obtained the characteristic peptide sequences for milk authentication by principal component analysis. The prediction accuracies for milk authentication by partial least-squares-discriminant analysis were greater than 95%. These results indicated that peptide fingerprints with the chemometric analysis could be successfully applied for milk quality control.