Research Projects

The increasing spending capacity of Indian citizens has led to a shift towards purchasing fresh, frozen, and meat-based food items. However, adulteration practices in the meat industry can have unhealthy and religious repercussions. India is the largest exporter of buffalo meat, and any adulteration in this product could lead to significant loss in the meat industry's business. Pork exports are also possible in South Asian and European countries, providing financial assistance to farmers involved in pig farming. Food-based regulatory bodies need to adopt newer and more efficient techniques for determining adulteration in meat. Conventional methods, such as physical, histological, or anatomical evaluation, protein, and nucleic acid molecular marker methods, suffer from lack of accuracy or inability to carry out tests according to sample collection time and point. An alternative method, the polymerase spiral reaction (PSR), can accurately identify DNA from diverse species and be performed in a relatively short time. The PSR isothermal amplification process is highly target-specific and requires only one primer set, making it a cut above other isothermal amplification methods like LAMP. The study aims to develop an accurate and efficient PSR-based assay targeting the conserved mitochondrial D-loop region and mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene of different species. The standardized PSR assay will be used to develop a multiplex PSR, and comparisons with PCR-based methods will be made to estimate the accuracy of the PSR assay.