Hello. My name is Christopher Kyle. I'm a professor here at Trent University. I'm also the director of the Natural Resources DNA Profiling and Forensic Centre.
Today, I would like to talk to you about some of the centre's services to give you some context on a test that we developed that distinguishes between spent hens and broiler meat.
Our facility provides molecular diagnostic support for a range of wildlife research and environmental pathogen detection, including waste-water detection that we report to public health agencies. Our facility also includes a forensic wildlife DNA lab, where we provide expert witnesses and services for a range of federal and provincial agencies that have included the RCMP, Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada. Cases range from poaching, animal abuse, animal attacks, parentage testing of breeding stock and, importantly for today, food mislabelling.
As I mention food mislabelling, I think it's important to introduce my colleague Geoff Lumby, who founded Sterisense. Sterisense and Trent work together on industrial commercialization, testing of international seafood and retail company samples for species identification and population verification. This relationship expanded greatly in 2011, when Maple Leaf Foods approached Sterisense and Trent University to develop a spent-fowl test that distinguished between broiler meat and spent fowl and assessed the fraudulent mislabelling of spent fowl.
In 2012, contracts were inked between Maple Leaf Foods and the Chicken Farmers of Canada with the planned phases of research and development followed by proficiency testing and subsequent deployment by the government. By 2014, we had an approximately 800-sample database that was built from sire and dam lines of commercial genetics companies with a three-stage test to assess shipments across the border. I think it's important to mention what these three phases do.
The first phase was to sort sex identification where the expectation was that spent hens from egg layers would have roughly a 98% to 2% ratio of females to males, whereas broilers would have a ratio that was roughly fifty-fifty. The second stage involved using genetic differences between broiler lines and egg-laying lines to distinguish between the groups. Third, in some cases, the parental stock of broilers can enter the spent-fowl market, so we actually had a third phase to distinguish parental stock from the actual broiler meat itself. This was completed in 2014.
From 2015 to 2017, we did some testing for different commercial groups and had ongoing discussions with CBSA and CFIA to discuss the implementation of the test and assess the validity of the test. It wasn't until 2018 that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada sent us 90 samples to assess the test. Of the 90 samples, three actually weren't even chickens but were assessed as being a turkey, a cow and a duck. Of the remaining 87 samples, 73 were properly distinguished; 13 of the samples were unassigned, as some of the genetic variants that we came across were not in our database and thus couldn't be assigned; and one was declared as a misassigned sample, something that I'll put an asterisk around for now.
After this test, there were some discussions to discuss the results, and in 2019, CBSA representatives came to visit the Trent lab. However, since then, it wasn't until the last two weeks that we've had some communications with some of these agencies to discuss the test again.
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to take part in your study. I also thank you for your interest in the genetic test that we've developed.