Fraud identification in industrial meat products by multiplex PCR assay

The identification of animal species used in industrial meat products is very important in respect to economic considerations because European Union, which has implemented a set of very strict procedures to correctly label food. In this paper we present conserved region from mitochondrial 12S rRNA and 16S rRNA genes are powerful region for evaluate the presence of fraudulently added meat in compound food by multiplex polymerase chain reaction assay for the identification of most species (ruminant, poultry and porcine). For each food sources (ground meat, sausages and cold cut) 10 samples were collected and DNA extracted successfully. The results demonstrated that none of the samples were contaminated with porcine residuals, but 40% of sausages samples and 30% of cold cut samples were contaminated with poultry residuals. Also the ground meat samples were not contaminated with poultry residuals. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.