Food Fraud Research Paper

In meat industries the adulteration process represents the presence of unknown species of meat, use of meat varieties of commercially lower value, use of low quality raw materials, replacement of animal or plant proteins and incorrect labeling of ingredients. Nowadays the mislabeling fraud is a common event in the food products industry like meat products trading (1, 2). According to the United States Pharmacopeial Convection the definition of food fraud is the deliberate mislabeling of food products for financial gain with the intent of deceiving and cheating the consumers regarding what is actually in the packages of food products (3). (Spink and Moyer 2011) define food fraud as any substitution, addition, tampering, misrepresentation of

The important question is why the detection of food fraud is important? The detection of food fraud is a necessary process to protect the consumer from the various risks of health, as well as due to many considerations, nutritional and religious reasons, in addition to prevent losing consumer confidence in the food products in the markets and as a result of this, maintain health and economy at the same time. Consequently, there is a special need for using new methods enabling rapid, sensitive and with appropriate cost to detect species specific differentiation of food adulterations in different food products. The development of new and advanced techniques for the authentication of food products continues rapidly with increasing consumer awareness of food safety and authenticity affairs. Food authentication is also of concern to food processors that do not wish to be subjected to inequitable competition from fraudulent food

PCR based techniques include Species Identification by Specific PCR, species identification by Polymerase chain reaction - Restriction fragment length polymorphism, species identification by random amplification of polymorphic DNA and species identification by using Forensically Informative nucleotide sequencing and other many different technologies. Naturally, all these methods have special advantages and disadvantages The most important disadvantages of these methods as time consuming, high cost and low sensitivity (6, 7, 8). The comparison of different methods of species identification based on protein analysis with those related to DNA analysis appears to indicate that the second group offers unquestionable advantages resulting from the characteristics unique for DNA because all genetic information presented in DNA of such organism. DNA is independent of the type of tissue it resides in. Therefore, it does not problem, whether the sample taken for analysis is collected from muscles, blood, liver or other sites. DNA provides high information than protein and this because the character of the genetic code