Meat species determination

Abstract

The determination of meat species is an important issue because of an increasing trend of adulteration and mislabeling of species in processed meat products. This affects the economy, religious beliefs, and health of consumers. Various analytical techniques have been developed for the determination of meat species in meat products. These techniques are based on different principles and have certain advantages and disadvantages in terms of sensitivity, specificity, ease of operation, resource availability, multiplexity, rapidity, interpretation of results, etc. Protein-based approaches cannot distinguish closely related species and results can be affected by harsh processing conditions. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and isothermal amplification are nucleic acid-based techniques for the sensitive and specific determination of meat species. Spectroscopic techniques are gaining popularity because of rapidity but these techniques have low sensitivity, specificity, and multiplexing is quite difficult in these techniques. Currently, the focus is on the development of point-of-care (POC) on-site detection techniques that can be used under low-resource settings. These POC devices are based on many principles including PCR, isothermal amplification, or protein-based (antigen-antibody) identification.