Cooking DNA: the effect of ‘domestic’ cooking methods on detection of GM potato

Abstract

The ability to detect GM material in otherwise unprocessed foods cooked using domestic methods is important should 'ready-to-eat' foods require labelling. This study addresses the issue of DNA degradation in foods as a result of cooking. A number of 'domestic' cooking methods were shown to affect the length of DNA sequences able to be PCR amplified from potato samples and the degree of degradation was treatmentspecific. However, a. real-time PCR assay was developed and. GM material was positively identified in all cooked GM potato samples. This confirms that GM material should be able to be detected in otherwise unprocessed food samples cooked using domestic methods, even if the cooking process has partially degraded the DNA. Results indicate, however, that there may be implications of the cooking process on the ability to accurately quantify GM content in some cooked samples.

The Toolbox of Methods for Multidirectional Characterization of Dietary Nucleic Acids; Verification for Raw and Processed Food Products

“…From the available literature, it is known that raw and processed meat products contain in their cellular structure both nuclei and nucleic acids that have not been degraded by either aging or tenderization processes occurring in the meat after animal death (Adjei et al 1995) or thermal and culinary treatment. Until now, it has been found that boiling at elevated and atmospheric pressure, frying in deep fat, or microwave treatment retains DNA fragments of plant (Van Der Colff and Podivinsky 2008) or animal origin (Arslan et al 2006) of sufficient quality and quantity to enable amplification of these fragments with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques. This applies to experiments on both identification of species and amplification of fragments encoding particular proteins, specific to a source material.…”

The role of food ingredients and technology in New Zealand

“…, 2008), as well as the carbohydrate based research of Fernando et al. (2008), Ikhu‐Omoregbe & Bushi (2008) and van der Colff & Podivinsky (2008).…”