LTL investigates massive sequencing techniques to combat food fraud

The Food Fraud project, an initiative of Laboratorios Tecnológicos de Levante, demonstrates the effectiveness of genomic methods to certify the composition of food.

 

Spain is the European country with the most food fraud in its products of origin, according to data from EIT Food, a non-governmental food organization that has the support of the European Union, (data from 2019). It is a problem that worries governments, consumers, and also companies in the food sector, which need new tools to solve it.

Under this framework, Laboratorios Tecnológicos de Levante (LTL) is carrying out the Food Fraud project for the "Research and development of new techniques for detecting food fraud using massive sequencing techniques", financed by the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness of the Generalitat Valenciana (IVACE), through FEDER funds.

The LTL company wants to demonstrate through this project the interest in applying genomic techniques as a methodology for the analysis and certification of food composition, to guarantee its quality and combat food fraud related to incorrect labeling or substitution of ingredients, among others. The research is currently focused on meat and fish, two of the five food categories that generate the most investigations per year, according to data from EIT Food.

Food Fraud represents progress in the development of fast and effective technologies against food fraud, once again demonstrating the technical feasibility of massive sequencing in the field of food. The results obtained to date demonstrate the value of these new quality procedures for agri-food companies, which work rigorously to give consumers total security in the product they choose.

Benefits of new mass sequencing techniques

The genomic techniques used in the project are based on massive sequencing (NGS, Next Generation Sequencing). By using these techniques, all the DNA present in a food sample is isolated, amplified, and subsequently identified with one of the different species to which those amplified DNA strands belong. This allows, in a single assay, to extract all the species that are included in a portion of food, instead of making single detections.

Therefore, the methodology based on massive sequencing has great advantages over the conventional methods that are currently used for the identification of species in food. And it’s that, genomic techniques are capable of quickly detecting species that are not routinely analyzed in the usual processes, and also allows the scalability of the number of samples that are analyzed in each batch.

The results obtained so far by Laboratorios Tecnológicos de Levante show that "the massive sequencing methods used are a useful tool for detecting the presence of unwanted or unknown species in complex food samples", explained the Genomics department of these laboratories.

The project includes an economic study of comparison between the investigated genomic sequencing techniques and the conventional methods of species identification, which demonstrates how genomics means the reduction of costs and execution times of these analyses. This aspect is essential to arouse the interest of food companies, which would gain greater flexibility and agility in the verification of food and its release to the market in a safe and attractive way for the consumer.

More security for the industry and the consumer

The project could involve the development of a standardized, efficient and robust analytical protocol that improves the evaluation of foods for daily consumption before reaching the sales line, for the benefit of food companies and consumers. And with this, the door would be opened to the drafting of specific legislation for these quality processes.

The evolution of this research raises its application, not only to meat and fish, but also its extrapolation to all types of food, which would offer total security and a unified guarantee method.

Likewise, another of the actions to combat food fraud that this project is implementing is the comparison that will be carried out of the molecular results of foods on the market with the nutritional information lists, in order to verify the correct labeling of the product.

Next steps of the project

Details of the results obtained so far in Food Fraud evince that the method already works sensitively and completely reliably on meats and complex samples (such as hamburgers and ground meats); and it’s being perfected for the detection of fish, "although the ultimate goal is to be able to offer a method that includes all groups of processed and unprocessed foods," add the responsible for the Food Fraud project.

In the case of detecting unwanted or unknown species, the method will include additional verification validation based on qPCR, which makes it possible to accurately certify the presence of the unwanted species, detecting its presence whenever it is equal to or greater than a 0.1% of the total food, according to the detection limit of the method (LOD 95%).

Additionally, Food Fraud has included the development of qPCR-based methods to certify the absence of Meat and Fish DNA in vegan products. Which can be used as a useful tool by itself, or be accompanied in the future by the massive sequencing of foods of plant origin where it is intended to certify the absence of vertebrate DNA.

Food Fraud has passed the middle of its execution, and will present final results in June of this year.