On 20/02/13 16:40, Tim Streater wrote:

And they would test for *what*, precisely?

Non-beef DNA sequences, perhaps?

I think this is where the knowledge level of all us armchair critics is
too low. Can you uniquely and definitively characterise a non-beef DNA
sequence? Doing that you're gonna get false positives from all the other
ingredients.

And how low is "low enough"? 1% horsemeat seems to be causing the
chatterati to have a fit of the vapours. But what about .1%? Or 0.001%?

99% of human DNA is shared with monkeys etc. I don't know how much
Cattle DNA is shared with horses, or cabbages for that matter, but
probably quite a lot. So you will always be looking for the very small
sequences of DNA that are unique.



--
djc