“…The discovery that the somatic cells present in milk may be used as source of DNA (Lipkin, Shalom, Khatib, Soller, & Friedmann, 1993), led to the development of several PCR-based techniques to allow milk origin identification in dairy products, such as Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) (Abdel-Rahman & Ahmed, 2007;Fontanesi, Beretti, Dall'Olio, Portolano, Matassino & Russo, 2011), multiplex (Agrimonti, Pirondini, Marmiroli, & Marmiroli, 2015;Bottero et al, 2003;Gonçalves, Pereira, Amorim, & van Asch, 2012) and Real Time PCR (Agrimonti et al, 2015;Ganopoulos, Sakaridis, Argiriou, Madesis, & Tsaftaris, 2013;López-Calleja et al, 2007). Despite the fact that these techniques have been successfully reported for identification of milk source, the differentiation of milk origin at an intra-species level is still a major challenge (Choy, Oh, & Kang, 2001;Cirillo et al, 2012;Fontanesi, Beretti, Dall'Olio, Portolano, Matassino, & Russo, 2011;Sardina et al, 2015). Furthermore the lack of genetic information of Portuguese ovine breeds poses as a http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.05.109 0308-8146/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.…”