"djc" wrote in message
...
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.

And thats trivially done and even allows you to
work out the individual species of fish etc too.