A new SCAR marker potentially useful to distinguish Italian cattle breeds

In recent years, the safeguarding of Italian native cattle breeds has increased the recovery of these breeds and the promotion of their products by enhancing the application of useful methods to trace the origin of meat products. The random amplified polymorphic DNA sequence (RAPD–PCR) followed by characterised amplified region (SCAR) marker approach could be considered an advantageous method to ensure food quality and origin, and represents a further opportunity to recover Italian autochthonous cattle breeds. Here, we report the results of RAPD–PCR using 42 primers and the development of two informative SCAR markers. Ten different clones for each cultivar-specific RAPD fragment were sequenced and database searches of sequence similarity were performed. The method enabled the detection of low amounts of DNA and, because of the relatively short dimension of the amplicon, it was suitable for the analysis of potentially degraded DNA obtained from processed commercial food that contained meat as an ingredient.