Abstract: Meat adulteration is one of the worldwide challenges for food quality control. In the last decade, identification technologies for meat species in food products have been mainly focused on specific proteins or DNA sequences. The precision of analysis has been at the genus or subgenus level, and the sensitivity of detection has reached up to the nanogram grade. Recently, more attention has been paid to the quantitative analysis of meat ingredients in foods. In this paper, recent technological advances for the identification of meat species in food products are reviewed. Moreover, some current potential quantitative technologies such as real-time PCR are discussed.

Key words: meat products, adulteration, species identification, quantification