Application of next generation sequencing for species identification in meat and poultry products: A DNA metabarcoding approach

Species substitution is one of the forms of food fraud for economic gain. The vast majority of existing DNA typing methods are targeted methods that developed for the determination of the specific species in food products. However, these methods are inappropriate for the analysis of unknown food products or a blend of more than one species. This study aimed to investigate the ability of high-throughput DNA metabarcoding to identify mammalian and avian species in mixed products. Next-generation sequencing of a short segment of the 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) mitochondrial gene was performed. Duplicate samples and two different databases produced very similar results. Although the relative abundance of reads obtained from each species could not make a quantitative assessment of the original species composition, this method still has the potential to determination of high and low contents of animal species in mixed products. Subsequently, we performed a market survey to identify animal species in 27 meat and poultry products sold in China using the developed DNA metabarcoding approach. The results indicated the presence of mislabeling of processed meat and poultry products.