A multiplex PCR assay for fraud identification of deer products

Attempts were made to established one-step multiplex PCR assay for the fraud identification of the mostly used species in deer products (bovine, ovine, porcine and poultry). Primers were selected from published papers or designed in the well-conserved region of tRNA-Val and 16S rRNA mitochondrial genes after alignment of the available sequences in the GenBank database. The primers generated specific fragments of 124, 183, 225 and 290 bp length for bovine, poultry, ovine and porcine, respectively. The detection limit was 1 ng for porcine and ovine primers, 5 ng for poultry primers and 0.5 ng for bovine primers. The results demonstrated that fraud phenomena are very epidemic in the deer products, especially heart, blood, penis and antler products. The multiplex PCR described in this study, proved to be very sensitive and reliable in species identification, could be considered as a further improvement of traditional methods based assay for the identification of deer products.