Food authenticity has very much moved into the focus of consumer, regulators and food industry alike. Since in 2013 the horsemeat scandal was uncovered, it triggered a series of actions and reports that highlight the vulnerability of large segments of the highly complex and global food supply chain to food adulteration.
One of the frequently encountered types of adulteration is the adulteration of meat and animal products. In its most recent annual report, the Food Fraud Network showed data that in the top ten product categories, fish and fish products take the second place, meat and meat products the third and poultry the fifth. Jointly, these three animal product categories eclipse any other product category.
There are different types of fraud that can be found in animal products. These include addition of illegal substances like melamine to milk, the treatment of tuna with carbon monoxide, and the replacement of high-quality species with lower quality ones, or even illegal ones. An example for this can be found in the publication by Fang and Zhang, where the addition of murine meat to substitute mutton has been reported.
Since there are many animal species that can be used for adulteration, using a species-specific PCR is often not economically viable when the adulterant species is not known. Here, the DNA barcoding approach is the better choice to cover a much wider range of species.
In the literature, numerous publications can be found that describe different primer sets to be used for barcoding. Unfortunately, not all methods have been thoroughly validated for the species they can, and, equally important, cannot detect.
This is where the work of the German §64 Food and Feed Law Methods Group for Animal and Plant Speciation has developed a tool that will help scientists to quickly determine which species can be detected and which cannot with a specific set of primers.
The tool, called BaTAnS – short for Barcoding Table for Animal Species – lists relevant publications, identifies the level of validation that has been performed for a specific method (and set of primers).
While in some cases, additional work has been performed for a method, e.g. in government laboratories, but is not published in the literature, this tool is used to continuously keep this information up-to-date.
The group, led by Nele Matthes and supported by the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety through the secretary of the working group, Kathrin Szabo, is providing this tool on its website.
The tool will be regularly updated and can also be obtained from the recent publication of the group
“Nele Matthes, Klaus Pietsch, Anke Rullmann, Gabriele Näumann, Bert Pöpping & Kathrin Szabo: The Barcoding Table of Animal Species (BaTAnS): a new tool to select appropriate methods for animal species identification using DNA barcoding, Molecular Biology Reports, 2020, DOI 10.1007/s11033-020-05675-1”
The most up-to-date version of the tool can be downloaded from the website of the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety.
