This document specifies a method for the identification of meat derived from mammals and birds to the level of genus or species and allows the identification of a large number of commercially important as well as exotic meat species using DNA barcoding.
This method was validated on DNA isolated from single pieces of raw meat. This method can also be used for the identification of single meat animal species in some processed products.
The described method is unsuitable for the analysis of highly processed foods with highly degraded DNA where the fragment lengths are not sufficient for amplification of the targets. Furthermore, it is not applicable for complex meat products containing mixtures of two or more meat species.
The identification of meat species is carried out by PCR amplification of either a segment of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene (cytb) or the cytochrome c oxidase I gene (cox1, syn COI) or both, followed by sequencing of the PCR products and subsequent sequence comparison with entries in databases.