Meat adulteration has been a significant issue in today’s food industry as it intertwine with religious, social and economic values. PCR based techniques for the detection of meat species in a meat admixture are primarily used by the industry as a reliable approach due to its sensitivity and reliability. This paper describes the design and verification of real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) based assay for the detection of meat from various nontarget species by using species specific oligonucleotides. Five sets of species-specific primers have been developed to target small regions (≤ 150 bp) of the mitochondrial D-loop. The specificity, sensitivity and reliability of each assay have been verified by using SYBR Green based RT-PCR. By using a cut-off CT of 30 cycles, all assays show sensitivity down to 0.05% of the DNA spike level. When applied to DNA templates from raw meat admixtures, assays were able to detect the target species up to a level of 0.1%. Hence, this verify the potential applicability of these assays in the meat industry.
There are relatively little data on bacteria with antimicrobial activities from Antarctic, especially from the South Shetland Islands when compared to the other parts of the world. Hence, this project was set to isolate and characterize bacteria that produce anti-microbial compounds from Greenwich Island (one of the South Shetland Islands), Antarctica. A total of 356 strains of bacteria were isolated from Greenwich Island. They were screened for antimicrobial activities against 13 Gram-negative and one Gram-positive indicator food-borne pathogens. Two out of the 356 Antarctic bacterial strains exhibited an antagonistic effect on the indicator strains, Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp., Klebsiella pneumoniae, Enterobacter cloacae, Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Bacillus cereus. The two Antarctic bacterial strains were designated as SS157 and SR13. Biochemical and 16S rDNA analysis indicated that the strain SS157 was closely related to Pseudomonas congelans while the strain SR13 was closely related to Pseudomonas tremae. The anti-microbial compounds produced by the two Antarctic bacteria were not sensitive to temperature and were not degraded by trypsin or pronase indicating that they were likely to be chemical compounds or antibiotics. Antimicrobial compounds from strains SS157 and SR13 were broad spectrum, and targeted both Gram-positive and negative pathogens.