On the feasibility of a CENTA-based biosensor to measure antibiotics concentration in milk

In veterinary practice antibiotics are used and abused all over the world both to treat diseases and prevent infections and, to increase feed efficiency thus promoting growth in food producing animals. With more than 30 years history, β-lactam antibiotics are nowadays one of the most important group of antibiotics in veterinary medicine. In this paper we investigate the possibility to realize a measurement method suitable for field testing and we propose a competitive biosensor based on a relatively low-cost chromogenic cephalosporin (CENTA) for the quantitative analysis of β-lactams concentration in milk. In particular, the reported preliminary study has been focused on cloxacillin and the reported results indicates that the method is potentially able to detect cloxacillin at a concentration of about one order of magnitude lower than the maximal residue limits (MRL) set by the European Commission.