Estimating animal abundance in ground beef batches assayed with molecular markers

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Meghen, C. N.
  • Platz, S. S.
  • Hu, X. S.
  • Moore, S. S.
  • Simila, J.
  • Plastow, G.

• 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.

• Date created

  2012

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Simulation and modeling
  • Probability density
  • Probability distribution
  • Population-genetics
  • Beef
  • Meat
  • Statistical models
  • Population size

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3HH6C930

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International