Rapid and Accurate Identification of Animal Species in Natural Leather Goods by Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

e demand for leather goods has grown globally in recent years. Industry revenue is forecast to reach 91.2 billion by 2018. ere is an ongoing labelling problem in the leather items market, in that it is currently impossible to identify the species that a given piece of leather is derived from. To address this issue, we developed a rapid and simple method for the speciic identiication of leather derived from cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, and deer by analysing peptides produced by the trypsin-digestion of proteins contained in leather goods using liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry. We determined species-speciic amino acid sequences by liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry analysis using the Mascot sooware program and demonstrated that collagen α-1(I), collagen α-2(I), and collagen α-1(III) from the dermal layer of the skin are particularly useful in species identiication.