Rapid biosensing of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in milk

Mastitis, mainly caused by different pathogens, is the most common disease in dairy cattle leading to the reduction of milk production and its quality. The development of analytical methods for rapid detection of the most common mastitis-causing microorganisms enabling timely treatment of sick and infected animals is particularly important. The routine detection of mastitis-causing bacteria commonly takes 2-3 days, too long to wait for starting the proper treatment. The proposed immunobiosensing system, based on specific binding of S. aureus in automatically renewable micro-columns and highly selective recognition of the bound bacteria by secondary antibodies, conjugated with a fluorescence marker, enabled the detection of S. aureus bacteria in milk within 17 minutes with a detection limit of 200 CFU ml(-1).