Quantitative detection of poultry meat adulteration with pork by a duplex PCR assay

A species-specific duplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay was developed for the simultaneous detection of pork and poultry meat species using the mitochondrial cytb and 12S rRNA as target genes for pork and poultry, respectively. By the amplification of binary reference meat mixtures, a linear normalised calibration curve was obtained using the fluorescence intensities of PCR products for pork (149 bp) and poultry (183 bp) species. The proposed method allowed the quantification of pork meat addition to poultry meat in the range of 1–75%, with a sensitivity of 0.1%. The in-house validation using samples with known amounts of pork meat (1.0%, 2.5%, 7.5%, 20.0% and 40%) evidenced a high reproducibility of the methodology (coefficient of variation from 4.1% to 7.6%). The successful application of the duplex PCR was also demonstrated by the high correlation (R² = 0.99) obtained from regression analysis between the predicted and the actual values of pork meat addition in blind meat mixtures. The suggested methodology presents a low cost, fast, easy and reliable alternative to estimate the level of poultry meat adulteration by the addition of pork meat.