A new method for testing meat fraud has been developed at the Institute of Food Research (IFR) in Norwich.
The method is said to be able to exploit subtle differences in a key meat protein so that the addition of just 1% of horsemeat into a beef burger or of beef into lamb mince can now be easily detected.
The technique, which has been developed by a research team led by Dr Kate Kemsley, is also reported to give an estimate of how much unlabelled meat is illegally concealed in the product.
It is said to work by detecting small differences in amino acid composition by measuring the mass of protein fragments within a sample.
If a burger contains only beef then only beef fragments, known as peptides, will appear. If, however, horsemeat is present then horse peptides will also show up.
In this fraudulent case the relative hit rate of the horse and beef peptides give an estimate of how much horse has been added.
The entire procedure is said to take approximately two hours.
The method has been demonstrated using raw meat from just four species, however IFR is confident it will be able to reveal meat adulteration in cooked retail products too.
IFR has teamed up with researchers in Stuttgart and Gdansk to extend this technique into other food products based on a suite of protein targets.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
