A novel portable Raman scattering platform for antibiotic screening in pig urine
A concern is the level of antibiotic residues in pork. Antibiotics are extensively used at high dosage in swine farming to accelerate growth, reduce mortality, improve fertility, and prevent various breast, blood, respiratory, and gastrointestinal bacterial infection in pigs. Antibiotics are crucial in maintaining swine health during their growth and are part of general veterinary practices. Unfortunately, excessive use of antibiotics can potentially result in antibiotic residues in human food.
Public health and food safety are gaining attention globally. Consumer health can be protected from chemical residues in meat by early detection or screening for antibiotic residues before selling the meat commercially. However, conventional practices are normally applied after slaughtering, which leads to massive business losses. This study aimed to use portable surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) equipped with multivariate curve resolution-alternation least squares (MCR-ALS) to determine the concentrations of enrofloxacin, oxytetracycline, and neomycin concentrations. This approach can overcome the problems of business loss, costs, and time-consumption, and limit of detection (LOD).
Figure-1: Raman spectra of standard antibiotics (A) enrofloxacin, (B) neomycin, and (C) oxytetracycline.
A combination of SERS sensing platform and MCR-ALS is a promising technique for on-farming screening. This platform can increase the efficiency of antibiotic detection in pig urine at lower costs and time. Expansion and fine adjustments of the Raman dataset may be required for individual farms to achieve higher sensitivity.