Species determination – Can we detect and quantify meat adulteration?

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.