Detection of counterfeit beef using real-time PCR

In recent years, along with the growing purchasing power of the population, there has been an increasing demand for quality meat products in which the dominant component should be only meat. Meat, in a broad sense, is defined as any edible animal part, including blood. However, if one wants to buy a quality meat product, he or she expects that the dominant component should be meat and not its various substitutes. In practice, we usually have to deal with meat products that contain very small amounts of meat or even none at all (cheap sausages made from skin and mechanically separated meat). For laboratory analysis, we used calibration samples containing from 100% to 0.1% of beef, as well as finished meat products such as ordinary sausages (20% beef), ordinary sausages (10% beef), fat sausages (7% bovine meat) and Liptovská salami (10% beef). In each of the experiments, the goal was to quantify the beef content using TaqMan real-time PCR assays: the calibration curve method should always clearly demonstrate the relationship to a change in a sample containing beef, which is not true for samples of finished meat products. When quantifying the content of beef in meat products, it is necessary to know all of the ingredients in its manufacture in order to take into account the presence of substances of increasing bovine DNA content.