New sensitive methods for fraud detection in buffalo dairy products

Abstract The rising consumption of buffalo milk derivatives in recent years has highlighted the search for buffaloes in Brazilian livestock farming. These products have greater added value compared with common dairy milk products. Consequently, addition of variable amounts of cows' milk during manufacture of buffalo dairy products may occur, which constitutes fraud by product adulteration. Thus, the present study developed and standardised a DNA extraction protocol for application on different dairy derivatives and two methods based on real-time PCR for fraud identification: high resolution melting (HRM) and rhAmp® SNP system. The extraction method allowed to extraction of DNA from eleven different dairy products. The sensitivity of the rhAmp technique (1%) was five times higher than that of the HRM assay (5%) and may be considered a better choice for identification of product adulteration when high sensitivity levels are required.