An electronic tongue taste evaluation: Identification of goat milk adulteration with bovine milk

An electronic tongue with 36 cross-sensibility sensors was built allowing a successful recognition of the five basic taste standards, showing high sensibility to acid, salty and umami taste substances and lower performance to bitter and sweet tastes. The taste recognition capability was afterwards tested in the detection of goat milk adulteration with bovine milk, which is a problem for the dairy industry. This new methodology is an alternative to the classical analytical methods used to detect caprine milk adulterations with bovine milk, being a simpler, faster and economical procedure. The different signal profiles recorded by the e-tongue device together with linear discriminant analysis allowed the implementation of a model that could distinguish between raw skim milk groups (goat, cow and goat/cow) with an overall sensibility and specificity of 97% and 93%, respectively. Furthermore, cross-validation showed that the model was able to correct classify unknown milk samples with a sensibility and specificity of 87% and 70%, respectively. Additionally, the model robustness was confirmed since it correctly or incorrectly classified milk samples with, respectively, higher and lower probabilities than those that could be expected by chance.