ABSTRACT
Milk and its by-products are major sources of essential nutrients and are consumed by all age groups. These products are usually contaminated with several microbial and nonmicrobial contaminants. These contaminants are a public health concern and are the primary cause of economic loss to the dairy industry. Hence, ensuring the quality and safety of dairy products is a mandatory objective of the dairy industry. A large number of samples is generated as a result of quality control, utilizing hazard analysis and critical control points, in the dairy industry. The analysis of all samples becomes difficult is labor intensive and costly. Thus, rapid and cost-effective methods are needed to ensure high-quality dairy products. Detection systems based on the analytical potential of spores are emerging technologies; they make it possible to analyse and detect contaminants in milk. The use of methods based on bacterial spores for analyzing the safety of milk is the subject of this chapter. The construction and design of spore-based assays for the detection of various types of pathogens, pesticides, antibiotic residues, and so on, in milk and milk products are discussed. Spore-based assays are also discussed in terms of their miniaturization on biochips.
