Abstract

Proper labelling of meat products is important to help fair-trade, and to enable consumers to make informed choices. However, it has been shown that labelling of species, expressed as weight/weight (w/w), on meat product labels was incorrect in more than 20% of cases. Enforcement of labelling regulations requires reliable analytical methods. Analytical methods are often based on protein or DNA measurements, which are not directly comparable to labelled meat expressed as w/w. This review discusses a wide range of analytical methods with focus on their ability to quantify and their limits of detection (LOD). in particular, problems associated with a correlation from quantitative DNA based results to meat content (w/w) are discussed. The hope is to make researchers aware of the problems of expressing DNA results as meat content (w/w) in order to find better alternatives. One alternative is to express DNA results as genome/genome equivalents. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Adulteration; Authentication; Fraud; Meat; Meat products; Real time PCR; Speciation; Species determination

Published in

Meat Science
2009, Volume: 83, number: 2, pages: 165-174
Publisher: ELSEVIER SCI LTD

UKÄ Subject classification

Food Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2009.06.003

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/85683