• Question: How do they find out if beef has horsemeat in it?

    Asked by jackthepanda13 to Rachel, Nik, Duncan, Julie on 18 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by jdawson2000.
    • Photo: Rachel Edwards-Stuart

      Rachel Edwards-Stuart answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      The only real way to test it is to do DNA testing on the meat to find out what animal contains – the test is quite specialist and takes a long time to do, and there are not many labs in the UK that can do these types of tests. That’s why it took quite a lot of time to find all the beef products that contained horsemeat.

    • Photo: Duncan Gaskin

      Duncan Gaskin answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      As Rachel has said the best test is to look for DNA that comes from horse. The technique used is a very sensitive one called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and in theory this is able to detect single molecules of DNA.

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