Abstract: In recent years, the problem of meat adulteration has occurred frequently. Full attention has been paid to DNAbased methodologies for meat species identification because of their high sensitivity and specificity, as well as rapid processing time and low cost. This article presents an overview of the commonly used DNA-based methodologies to verify the authenticity of meat and meat products with focus on their detection limits. Moreover, this review highlights the current applications and future prospects of real-time fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and digital PCR in the identification of animal origin ingredients. Finally, target genes from different sources (nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA) are compared in terms of their characteristics and their influence on the sensitivity and specificity of species identification and quantification.

Key words: adulteration, meat products, digital PCR, species determination