Cooked meat product analysis by LCMS/MS to determine between animal species using proteotypic peptide quantitative proteomic analysis

With the emergence of new food safety challenges innovative analytical technologies are being developed to enable industry stakeholders and regulators to make sound scientific decisions. These advances have been made in response to changing regulations and needs and also to help maintain the safety of the food chain. In the case of unwanted or undeclared ingredients food authenticity testing is important component in many quality and safety programs. In 2013, horse meat issues received intense scrutiny and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) techniques were used to screen for horse DNA in processed food samples. However, despite its widespread use in Europe for food fraud, PCR is problematic. DNA extraction kits are expensive and often require up to 8 h for the extraction, followed by cleanup and the PCR process. DNA is also prone to degradation especially in processed food. In contrast, mass spectrometry enables a promising approach to the detection of marker peptides in tryptic digests of horse, pig, beef and chicken with high sensitivity. In this work previously published proteotypic peptides were selected to detect horse, pork, beef and chicken using Skyline software (MacCoss Lab Software - University of Washington). These were used to interrogate Uniprot database FASTA download for myosin (43263 proteins) and collagen (44531 proteins) to determine no other species cross reactivity to pig myosin and collagen.