Detection of Prohibited Animal Products in Livestock Feeds by Single-Strand Conformation Polymorphism Analysis

Abstract

Single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) analysis of amplicons produced from a mitochondrial DNA region between the tRNA(Lys) and ATPase8 genes was applied for the detection of animal product within livestock feeds. Identification of prohibited animal (cattle, elk, sheep, deer, and goat) and nonprohibited animal (pig and horse) products from North America was possible based on the differential display of the single-stranded DNA fragments for the different animal species on SSCP gels. This method allowed specific detection and identification of mixed genomic DNA from different animal species. Trace amounts of cattle-derived materials were also detected in pig meat and bone meal and in grain-based feeds fortified with 10, 5, 1, or 0% porcine meat and bone meal. This study demonstrates the applicability of SSCP analyses to successfully identify the origin of animal species derived materials potentially present in animal feeds.

Pixel Selection for Near-Infrared Chemical Imaging (NIR-CI) Discrimination Between Fish and Terrestrial Animal Species in Animal Protein By-Product Meals

“…In terms of prediction accuracy, spatial interpolation yielded the most stable results for the prediction of fish meal samples (standard deviation ¼ 0.58), while the Mahalanobis distance method provided the best results (standard deviation ¼ 0.50) for terrestrial sample prediction. The results obtained here are broadly similar to those reported using DNA-based techniques, 50 whereby ruminant-derived materials were also detected in swine meat and bone meal. NIR-CI, which has the advantage of being nondestructive, can thus be used as a previous step to this kind of technique.…”