Single-Drop Raman Imaging Exposes the Trace Contaminants in Milk

Better milk safety control can offer important means to promote public health. However, few technologies can detect different types of contaminants in milk simultaneously. In this regard, the present work proposes a single-drop Raman imaging (SDRI) strategy for semiquantitation of multiple hazardous factors in milk solutions. By developing SDRI strategy that incorporates the coffee-ring effect (a natural phenomenon often presents in a condensed circle pattern after a drop evaporated) for sample pretreatment and discrete wavelet transform for spectra processing, the method serves well to expose typical hazardous molecular species in milk products, such as melamine, sodium thiocyanate and lincomycin hydrochloride, with little sample preparation. The detection sensitivity for melamine, sodium thiocyanate, and lincomycin hydrochloride are 0.1 mg kg–1, 1 mg kg–1, and 0.1 mg kg–1, respectively. Theoretically, we establish that the SDRI represents a novel and environment-friendly method that screens the milk safety efficiently, which could be well extended to inspection of other food safety.