Abstract:According to the cases of common meat adulteration seen in the market, four kinds of adulteration models were built: mixed beef-pork, mutton-pork, beef-duck, and mutton-duck by extracting genomic DNAs from fresh beef, mutton, pork, and duck and premixing them at certain ratios. Through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and sequence comparison using the universal primers COI-1 and COI-2, a COI gene–based method was established to detect adulteration in foods of animal origin. According to the pure meat DNA extraction rate T obtained from the experiment, the conversion of the adulteration ratio from the DNA level into the meat weight level was achieved. At the meat weight level, COI-2 primers provided a relatively accurate detection, and the detection limits of beef-pork, mutton-pork, beef-duck, and mutton-duck adulteration models were 5%, 8%, 1%, and 4%, respectively. The method was tested on 28 batches of collected meat product samples, and the ingredients of 89% of the identified samples were consistent with those described on the product labels. As a simple, rapid, and effective molecular identification approach, DNA barcoding can be directly applied to determine the animal species present in foods of animal origin and to detect adulteration.
