Immunological Discrimination of Poultry Meats

Abstract

Identification of meats of closely related species is an important problem for determination of the addition of undeclared meat in a ground meat mixture or processed meat mixture or processed meat product. Many attemqts have been made for mammalian meats but not for poultry meats.This paper describes a method which distinguishes immunologically between chicken's, turkey's duck's and quail's meat by using agar gel precipitation method.The antisera were made from rabbits and chickens immunized with the water extracts of the above poultry meats as follows: 1st day, 1ml of a meat extract with Freund complete adjuvant into the pale and muscle of each animal; 3rd week, 0.2ml of the extract only as a booster injection. The sufficient antibody titers were usually obtained 4 weeks later after the first injection in rabbits and 6 week in chickens.The unabsorbed antisera made from rabbits were cross-reacted to poultry meats but not reacted to mammalian meats. However, these cross-reactions could be removed by absorption with small amounts of the meat extracts of the cross-reacting species, and the absorbed antisera were made specific for the homologous species.The antisera made from chicken were usually specific for homologous species even before absorption, but the antibody titers were not so high as those of the rabbit antisera.Original Ouchterlony's method was improved by decreasing the distances among an antibody well and antigen wells on agar gel plate. By this method, a specific antiserumm could detect about 0.5mg/ml of protein in a saline extract of meat.