Riboflavin as an internal marker for spoilage and adulteration detection in milk

Milk is a common consumable in daily life due to its nutritional values. Ensuring milk's integrity and authenticity is a prime task for researchers and food industries by providing solutions to prevent spoilage and adulteration. We present a robust and reliable optical method to ensure milk quality through its constituent riboflavin as an internal biomarker. Riboflavin is a widely present constituent in several food matrices. This research demonstrates the characteristic fluorescence of riboflavin for checking spoilage and urea adulteration in real-time. The proposed method can even detect and quantify high urea adulteration levels up to 80 mM (i.e., eight times permissible standard value) with a LOD value of 9.3 mM. The linearity (0-80 mM) and high R² value (0.98, 0.93) of riboflavin's fluorescence in pure and milk solutions, respectively present this strategy closely associated with fate of milk samples in terms of spoilage and adulteration. Thus, this optical method of riboflavin biosensing in real-time is intuitive and conclusive for determining milk quality.