Counter immunoelectrophoresis a simple method for the detection.pdfVIP

Vet. Med. – Czech, 47, 2002 (5): 143–147 Original Paper 143 Identification of meat species is an important task of food quality control. Intentional adulteration of meat products with other-than-declared meat species can bring the manufacturer considerable economic profit. Moreover, adulteration is associated with a hazard of allergic reactions in sensitive consumers. The significance of meat species detection in meat products has risen dramatically in association with the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy which neces- sitated the implementation of effective methods for checking the declared meat products composition. Meat species can be identified by serological (Cutrufelli et al., 1987; Reddy et al., 2000), histological (Tremlova, 2000), immunochemical (Rencova et al., 2000), or molecular biological methods (Matsunaga et al., 1999; Krcmar and Rencova, 2001). The procedures of the identification of raw meat species by electrophoretic methods or ELISA are rather simple (Patterson and Whittaker, 1984). However most of the commercial antisera intended for species identification are prepared against blood proteins and are therefore suitable only for raw meat species dif- ferentiation The difficulties in the preparation of species spe- cific antisera against heat-processed proteins, as de- scribed by Kang’ethe and Lindqvist (1987), Kang’ethe and Gathuma (1987), and Hofmann et al. (1996) result from thermal denaturing of proteins. Therefore, anti- bodies to heat-stable soluble proteins, which retain their antigenicity after heating to 75°C, 100°C and even after autoclaving at 120°C for 30 min, must be pre- pared. Such proteins are present especially in adrenal tissues (Milgrom et al., 1963) and in small amounts also in striated muscles (Hofmann, 1977). In our experiments like Patterson and Jones (1989), crude mixture of proteins that remained