Probing changes to infant milk formulationsInfant milk formula is an alternative to breast milk for babies in their first year of life. Since breast milk contains all the nutrients required by young infants formula manufacturers aim to closely match their product's ingredients to those of breast milk.Functional proteins in human milk are essential for key biological functions such as immune system development explains Ruige Wu from the A*STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology. However some of these proteins are not found or are present at lower concentrations in infant formula products compared to human milk.Recently some manufacturers began advertising that their products contained elevated levels of functional proteins such as α-lactalbumin and immunoglobulin G. The ability to measure these functional proteins is very important to control and monitor the quality of infant formula products explains Wu. Supplementation of formula products is expected to be regulated shortly.Regulation of these products requires an easy and inexpensive quantitative method to detect low levels of functional proteins in milk which also contains abundant other proteins. However Wu explains that existing techniques based on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) use expensive equipment and time-consuming methods with pretreatment alone taking several hours. She and her co-workers have now developed a microchip capillary-electrophoresis (CE)-based method that is cheaper has a shorter assay time and eliminates the need for pretreatment.Wu's team fabricated a custom-made microfluidic-chip CE device. The device separates the functional proteins from other more abundant proteins in the formula using isoelectric focusing. In this process the proteins move through a gel with a pH gradient and the point at which they stop on the gel depends on their charge. Since each protein has a slightly different charge separation occurs. This takes just two minutes.The functional proteins are then transferred into the embedded capillary for further separation according to their mass-to-charge ratio explains Wu. This capillary zone electrophoresis separation step takes 18 minutes. The team then identified and measured the amount of protein present -- while still on the CE column -- using ultraviolet detection. The concentrations of functional proteins are determined from the respective absorbance values and calibration curves she says.The reliability of the device was tested with infant milk formula samples spiked with known amounts of various functional proteins. Results close to 100 per cent recovery were obtained says Wu.Our next steps are to collaborate with industry partners in the manufacturing or quality-control testing of infant formula or similar protein rich products she says.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by The Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.Journal Reference: