Determination of pig sex in meat and meat products using multiplex real time-PCR

For specific production lines, European retail companies demand exclusively female pork meat. To control the quality of their suppliers the identification and a quantitative detection of the animal sex origin of the meat is therefore of importance for meat processors. To enable a fast and reliable detection of male pig meat, a real time-PCR-system was designed in the present study. This was based on the genes AMEL-X and AMEL-Y. The real time-PCR assay allowed the detection of male pig meat at a concentration of 1% yielding a detection probability of 100% while the detection probability investigating meat samples containing 0.1% male pig meat was 44.4%. The analytic sensitivity of this system was assessed to be