Nanobioprobe for the Determination of Pork Adulteration in Burger Formulations

Abstract

We report the development of a swine-specific hybrid nanobioprobe through a covalent integration of a fluorophore-labeled 27-nucleotideAluI-fragment of swine cytochrome b gene to a 3 nm gold nanoparticle for the determination of pork adulteration in processed meat products. We tested the probe to estimate adulterated pork in ready-to-eat pork-spiked beef burgers. The probe quantitatively detected 1–100% spiked pork in burger formulations with ≥90% accuracy. A plot of observed fluorescence against the known concentration ofAluI-digested pork DNA targets generated a concave curve, demonstrating a power relationship (y=2.956x0.509) with a regression coefficient (R2) of 0.986. No cross-species detection was found in a standard set of pork, beef, chicken, mutton, and chevon burgers. The method is suitable for the determination of very short-length nucleic acid targets which cannot be estimated by conventional and real-time PCR but are essential for the determination of microRNA in biodiagnostics and degraded DNA in forensic testing and food analysis.