Quantification of adulterated fox-derived components in meat Products by Drop Digital Polymerase Chain Reaction

There are still large research gaps in the testing standards for non-edible meat-derived components at present. Here we report a novel approach to quantification of adulterated fox-derived components in meat products by drop digital polymerase chain reaction(ddPCR). It was better to identify the adulteration that has been added either inadvertently or deliberately during the process by designing single primers on housekeeping genes. In this paper, the fox meat was used as the experimental materials and the relationship between sample quality and copy number was established by extracting DNA and using DNA concentration as an intermediary. The results of ddPCR showed that both the relationships between meat weight and DNA concentration and between DNA concentration and DNA copy number (C) were nearly linear within the dynamic range. The DNA concentration was utilized as an intermediate value to establish the formulae about the relationship between the original meat weight and DNA copy number: Mfox=0.05C+2.7. The method's feasibility was validated using artificial adulteration of different proportions The establishment of this method provides technical support for relevant regulatory authorities to monitor the adulteration of fox meat. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.