The consequences of direct human contact with bushmeat have been severe. Illegal wildlife trade is mainly fuelled by the need for diet and income supplementation 3. Efforts to regulate or prevent illegal wildlife trade depends on accurate, efficient, and sustainable tools for species identification of confiscated and surveillance samples. While this is a major crisis for wildlife in central and western Africa, it is a growing concern in eastern and southern Africa 2. Up to 270 tons of bushmeat were flown into Europe through a single airport in 2010 from Africa 1. The global bushmeat trade is valued at several billion US dollars. Unsustainable hunting, consumption, and sale of bushmeat in Africa contribute immensely to the decline of threatened wild animal species.

This approach is being adopted for high-throughput pre-screening of potential bushmeat samples in East African forensic science pipelines.

Using the approach, we identified (i) giraffe among covertly sampled meat from Kenyan butcheries, and (ii) forest elephant mitochondrial sequences among savannah elephant reference samples. Here, we adapted a rapid, low-cost approach to differentiate 10 domestic and 24 wildlife species that are common in the East African illegal wildlife products trade based on their unique high-resolution melting profiles from COI, cytochrome b, and 16S ribosomal RNA gene PCR products. However, forensic identification of vertebrate tissue relies on sequencing of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I ( COI) вЂbarcodeвЂ™ gene, which remains costly for purposes of screening large numbers of unknown samples during routine surveillance. Reliable molecular identification of vertebrate species from morphologically unidentifiable tissue is critical for the prosecution of illegally-traded wildlife products, conservation-based biodiversity research, and identification of blood-meal hosts of hematophagous invertebrates.

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