Issue 7, 2016

Meat, the metabolites: an integrated metabolite profiling and lipidomics approach for the detection of the adulteration of beef with pork

Abstract

Adulteration of high quality food products with sub-standard and cheaper grades is a world-wide problem taxing the global economy. Currently, many traditional tests suffer from poor specificity, highly complex outputs and a lack of high-throughput processing. Metabolomics has been successfully used as an accurate discriminatory technique in a number of applications including microbiology, cancer research and environmental studies and certain types of food fraud. In this study, we have developed metabolomics as a technique to assess the adulteration of meat as an improvement on current methods. Different grades of beef mince and pork mince, purchased from a national retail outlet were combined in a number of percentage ratios and analysed using GC-MS and UHPLC-MS. These techniques were chosen because GC-MS enables investigations of metabolites involved in primary metabolism whilst UHPLC-MS using reversed phase chromatography provides information on lipophilic species. With the application of chemometrics and statistical analyses, a panel of differential metabolites were found for identification of each of the two meat types. Additionally, correlation was observed between metabolite content and percentage of fat declared on meat products’ labelling.

Graphical abstract: Meat, the metabolites: an integrated metabolite profiling and lipidomics approach for the detection of the adulteration of beef with pork

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
15 jan 2016
Accepted
16 feb 2016
First published
16 feb 2016
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Analyst, 2016,141, 2155-2164

Meat, the metabolites: an integrated metabolite profiling and lipidomics approach for the detection of the adulteration of beef with pork

D. K. Trivedi, K. A. Hollywood, N. J. W. Rattray, H. Ward, D. K. Trivedi, J. Greenwood, D. I. Ellis and R. Goodacre, Analyst, 2016, 141, 2155 DOI: 10.1039/C6AN00108D

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