Are these food products fraudulent? Rapid and novel triplex-direct PCR assay for meat identification
1. Introduction
With increasing consumption of ready-made food and contin- uous expansion of the food industry, identification of food ingredient is required by law in many countries [1]. This is to protect consumers from undue profit makers, for example, using materials that are sub-standard, breach religious laws, or as substitutes for more expensive ones. Constant developments of technique for the identification of meat and meat products are being made. At present, PCR techniques are common as they have high sensitivity and specificity [2].
Direct PCR is popular in microbiology and forensic DNA analysis. This method is rapid, economical and has reduced contamination rate because DNA extraction is omitted. Moreover, DNA extraction has low yield (16–30% of total DNA) [3,4]. Consequently, multiplex direct PCR to identify three types of meat – pork, mutton and chicken – was developed and validated in this study. This is the first multiplex direct PCR for meat identification.