Abstract: Meat and meat products are the important nutrition sources for human being life,but adulteration of meat products occur frequently on the market in recent years,which makes the quality and safety of meat and meat products has become a hot topic all over the world. The identification of animal sources targeting nucleic acids is a widely used method at present. In nucleic acid detection,mitochondrial gene or nucleic genes are often used as targets,and there is a lack of unified standards. In this study,Shaoxing duck and Beijing duck and other different breeds and fresh tissues（duck blood,duck breast,duck liver,duck skin,duck heart and duck leg meat）were used as experimental materials,DNA was extracted from them and microdrop digital PCR was used to compare the copy numbers between mitochondrial DNA（mtDNA）and nucleic DNA. The variation coefficient of the copy number and their ratios were used as judgment basis. Results demonstrated that the copy number of nucleicDNA in various duck tissues were relatively stable,and the variation coefficient in nucleic DNA was smaller than that in mtDNA,suggesting that the nucleic DNA was the most suitable DNA source for the quantitative detection of adulteration of duck meat and products. Notably,the variation coefficient of the ratio of mtDNA copy number to nuclear DNA copy number in the duck leg meat was the smallest,indicating that duck leg meat was the best choice while we used mtDNA as the target gene for adulteration detection.

Key words: mitochondrial DNA, genomic DNA, DNA copy number, digital PCR, meat adulteration