Scientists at the Universitat Aut≥noma de Barcelona, Spain, have developed and validated an identity test that can be used to confirm the breed and origin of meat from farm animals. The test was developed in collaboration with Applied Biosystems and used several specific genetic markers to identify individual animals. The findings were published in December in the scientific journal Animal Genetics (2007; 6 [38]).
Although microsatellite-based genotyping requires only a handful of markers to identify an individual with very high accuracy, the technique is very expensive. However, by selecting larger numbers of suitable SNPs, SNP-based genotyping can be equally accurate for larger scale testing.
This study used the SNPlex genotyping system and two 3730 DNA analysers from Applied Biosystems.
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