Metabolomics and Proteomics Approach Using LC-Orbitrap HRMS for the Detection of Pork in Tuna Meat for Halal Authentication

Adulteration of high-quality meat with non-halal meats causes a serious problem for some religions such as Muslim and Jewish. Tuna meat (TM) can be adulterated with pork by unethical producers for economic reasons. This research aimed to develop an untargeted proteomics and metabolomics approach using liquid chromatography�high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) to detect pork in TM. Untargeted metabolomics combined with principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) could differentiate and detect pork from adulterated TM samples. Twenty-one metabolites were identified as potential biomarkers for the differentiation of pork and TM samples. Proteomics analysis using LC-HRMS successfully detected peptide markers of pork such as HPGDFGADAQGAMSK, HDPSLLPWTASYDPGSAK, and FFESFGDLSNADAVMGNPK from myoglobin, carbonic anhydrase 3, and beta-haemoglobin, respectively. Both proteomics and metabolomics could detect up to 0.5 of pork concentration in TM. It can be concluded that the integration of metabolomics and proteomics analysis using LC-HRMS could be an effective method for the detection of pork adulteration in TM. These methods could be proposed as a standard operational procedure for the halal authentication of meat products. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.