title: Estimating animal abundance in ground beef batches assayed with molecular markers.
abstract: Estimating animal abundance in industrial scale batches of ground meat is important for mapping meat products through the manufacturing process and for effectively tracing the finished product during a food safety recall. The processing of ground beef involves a potentially large number of animals from diverse sources in a single product batch, which produces a high heterogeneity in capture probability. In order to estimate animal abundance through DNA profiling of ground beef constituents, two parameter-based statistical models were developed for incidence data. Simulations were applied to evaluate the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of a joint likelihood function from multiple surveys, showing superiority in the presence of high capture heterogeneity with small sample sizes, or comparable estimation in the presence of low capture heterogeneity with a large sample size when compared to other existing models. Our model employs the full information on the pattern of the capture-recapture frequencies from multiple samples. We applied the proposed models to estimate animal abundance in six manufacturing beef batches, genotyped using 30 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers, from a large scale beef grinding facility. Results show that between 411∼1367 animals were present in six manufacturing beef batches. These estimates are informative as a reference for improving recall processes and tracing finished meat products back to source.
authors.affiliation: Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. xin-sheng.hu@ualberta.ca
authors.forename: Xin-Sheng
authors.initials: XS
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Janika
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Simila
authors.forename: Sindey Schueler
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Platz
authors.forename: Stephen S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.forename: Graham
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Plastow
authors.forename: Ciaran N
authors.initials: CN
authors.lastname: Meghen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D002417:Cattle; D005511:Food Handling / Q000379:methods*; D005516:Food Microbiology; D059022:Food Safety; D005819:Genetic Markers / Q000235:genetics*; D014644:Genetic Variation; D005838:Genotype; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008460:Meat; D008461:Meat Products; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D011336:Probability; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
chemical_list: D005819:Genetic Markers