New Technology Beating Burger Fraudsters and Meat Adulterations

22 Sep 2016 --- Horse meat fraudulently mixed with burgers is now much easier to spot, thanks to new technology developed by food researchers who have devised a test to identify even tiny amounts of illegally concealed meat. Shoppers can be much more confident that their burgers are the real deal, says the UK Institute of Food Research (IFR), following a new method of testing for meat fraud. 

It’s all about looking at the subtle difference in key meat protein. Even just one percent of horse in a burger or of beef into lamb mince, for instance, is extremely easy to spot and the new technique even gives an estimate of how much unlabeled meat is fraudulently being concealed in the product.

The protein myoglobin causes the red color of f are made up of amino acids. The myoglobin of beef differs from that of horse by 18 amino acids. This means that if the beef and horse proteins are broken up in the same way, these small differences in amino acid composition can be detected by measuring the respective mass of protein fragments within a sample.

The test extracts protein from a meat sample that is chemically chopped into fragments or peptides using an enzyme. The peptide “soup” is fed into a mass spectrometer to measure the masses of only a handful of selected peptides.

The test will clearly show what makes up a burger; a burger containing just beef will appears, but if a tiny amount of horse meat has been secretly slipped into the mix, then some horse peptides will immediately 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 takes around two hours.

The work is being led by Dr Kate Kemsley from IFR and appears in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE is the world’s first peer review scientific video journal) as a free downloadable video clip showing how the experiment is done.

The research for this vital test was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Though so far demonstrated using raw meat from just four species, the team have also shown that key marker peptides persist in supermarket products, including for lamb in ready-curry and for beef in canned corned beef.

They are confident they can reveal meat adulteration in cooked retail products, of key interest to consumers and producers alike. The IFR group have teamed up with researchers in Stuttgart and Gdansk to extend this technique into other more complicated food products based on a suite of protein targets.