食品加工および技術ジャーナル

概要

Bacterial Spore Based Biosensor for Detection of Contaminants in Milk

Kumar N, Thakur G, Raghu HV, Singh N, Sharma PK, Singh VK, Khan A, Balhara M, Avinash, Lawaniya R, Kouser S, Tehri N, Gopaul Rajesh and Shivani Arora

Milk and milk products comprise essential nutrients for all age groups. Hence ensuring the quality and safety of dairy products offered to the consumers is mandatory objective of the dairy industry. Bacterial spores one of the hardiest forms of life can be exploited as biosensing element over the cell based detection system because of longer shelf life of the spores. Bacterial spores in the presence of favorable conditions germinate into metabolically active vegetative cells. The ability of spores to carry out cycle between the spore state and germinated cell contributes to their attractiveness as biosensing systems. The presence of contaminants such as antibiotics, aflatoxin and bacteria affects the life cycle events of bacterial spores and hence can be exploited as platform for detection of aforementioned in milk. This review focuses on the application of bacterial spores as biosensing system for contaminants in milk system. Furthermore, we have focused our attention on the discussion of principal concepts of spore structure and spore germination and examples of spore based detection systems that have been achieved up until now to detect potential contaminants in milk in our laboratory.