Identification of meat origin in food products–A review

•Adulteration of meat products has become a serious issue in the world.•Development of simple methods for meat identification has lately attracted notice.•DNA-hybridization and Polymerase chain reactions are the main DNA-based techniques.•DNA-hybridization is an outstanding alternative technique for meat identification.

Recently, falsified meat products have become a serious problem. Many issues such as public health, fair trade, and religious consideration are directly influenced by adulterations of meat. To overcome this problem, various analytical methods, based on physical, chemical, anatomical, histological, and biological approaches are being utilized to identify meat species. Nevertheless, by virtue of their inherent limitations, most of these methods have been replaced by more accurate and sensitive detection methods, such as DNA-based molecular techniques. This review highlights the most extensive and updated overview of meat species identification based on DNA hybridization techniques. It will be demonstrated that the DNA-hybridization method is a highly sensitive method in analyzing the similarity of DNA strands, where the limit of detections was reported to be from 0.1% to less than 0.01%, depending on the meat species.

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