DNA Markers as a Tool for Genetic Traceability of Primary Product in Agri-Food Chains

Abstract

<p>The agri-food components of the Made in Italy are well known all over the world, therefore they may significantly contribute to the Italian economy. However, also owing to a large number of cases of improper labelling, the Italian agro-food industry faces an ever-increasing competition. For this reason, there is a decline of consumers’ confidence towards food production systems and safety controls. To prevent erroneous classification of products and to protect consumers from false instore information, it is important to develop and validate techniques that are able to detect mislabelling at any stage of the food-chain. This paper describes some examples of genetic traceability of primary products in some important plant food chains such as durum wheat, olive and tomato, based on DNA analysis both of raw material and of processed food (pasta, olive oil, and peeled tomato).</p

An enhanced analytical procedure to discover table grape DNA adulteration in industrial musts

“…Among them, microsatellites (SSRs) have proved to be the markers of choice due to: i) their ability to detect small-sized fragments of DNA; ii) their codominant nature; iii) their speciespecificity; iv) their high degree of polymorphism; and, v) their high reproducibility (Tautz, 1989). Such markers have been successfully employed for varietal traceability and adulteration detection in many processed foods that may have undergone DNA degradation, including: bread, semolina and pasta (Pasqualone, Montemurro, Grinn-Gofron, Sonnante, &Blanco, 2007 andSonnante et al, 2009), tomato products (Sardaro, Marmiroli, Maestri, & Marmiroli, 2013;Turci et al, 2010), sweet cherry preserves (Ganopoulos, Argiriou, & Tsaftaris, 2011a), olive oil (Muzzalupo, Pellegrino, & Perri, 2007;Pasqualone et al, 2012;Scarano, Montemurro, Corrado, Blanco, & Rao, 2012), and fermented table olives (Pasqualone et al, 2013).…”

Are the Innovative Electronic Labels for Extra Virgin Olive Oil Sustainable, Traceable, and Accepted by Consumers?

“…The price paid does include the resources to set-up (scale on the base of the production needs) and run the system. Such a cost should be in an acceptable range that would incentivize companies to adopt traceability systems in order to receive reasonable benefits with positive repercussions concerning information reliability, effectiveness, and productivity depending upon the organization [11]. In the competitive market, the increase of costs, as a result of traceability systems, can rebound in the consumer with little change in quantity demanded because of relatively lower food demand price elasticity compared to most industrial products [12].…”

DNA Markers for Food Products Authentication

“…DNA markers represent a very powerful tool to authenticate and trace plant species and varieties along food chains as reported by several scientific papers [30][31][32][68][69][70]75,110]. For example, SSRs are able to identify products in different segments of the tomato food chain revealing mislabel of tomato cans indicating the premium products "San Marzano" PDO that indeed was absent [66].…”