MOSCOW: Russian scientists have developed a quick and simple approach to accurately detect pig and chicken meat in raw and processed products.
“Our development helps to detect chicken and pork meat in samples fast and without using unnecessary devices,” said Anatoly Zherdev, a leading researcher of the Laboratory of Immunobiochemistry of the Research Center of Biotechnology RAS and the head of the project.
“All stages of our analysis take only 33 minutes. It is the fastest method for detecting chicken and pork additives in meat products. It doesn’t require sophisticated equipment or expensive reagents. We hope that our approach will help provide quality products to consumers and protect them from unscrupulous producers.”
The researchers said their full-cycle technique to control the chicken or pig adulteration of meat products, outlined in a study published in the journal Molecules, enables the rapid detection of pork and chicken impurities on-site with high accuracy in raw and processed meat mixtures. The technique could be adopted for the authentication of other meat products, they said.
The test consists of three minutes of crude DNA extraction, 20 min of recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) at 39 °C, and 10 minutes of lateral flow assay (LFA) detection.
The biochemists concluded that methodologies to identify additives in meat are developing beyond conventional PCR-based approaches. Using an RPA-LFA test reduced the sensitivity of the analysis and decreased the sample preparation time to three minutes, they said.
“This technique could be applied to processed meat products or meat after heating,” they added. “The proposed solutions will be useful for developing new rapid tools for identifying meat components even in trace quantities.”