DNA as a Biomaterial in Diagnosis of Food Adulteration and Food Safety Assurance

Abstract

Apart from general applications of DNA, it can also be used as tool to assure the food safety, which is the main aspect of this review. Increasing GMO productions also increased the concern regarding the adulteration of GMO food products in our daily life. Countries around the world, raising the regulations regarding the GMO products to the consumer's table. Subsequently, the mode of adulteration in food products with GMO products feels difficult to identify. The food products also adulterer with low cost products which can also be detected by the isolation and identification of DNA from that product. The main focus on this review is to discuss the utilization of DNA as an effective tool to detect the adulteration and GMO content in various food products like oil, honey, beverages, baked products, animal feed, fried products, adulteration of milk and milk products. In the field of food safety, microbial contamination is also a major problem. Isolation of DNA from food can also reveals the presence of microbial contamination in the earlier stage. Also, the review emphases the way of utilizing DNA in differentiating organic foods from non-organic foods. ISSN: 2576-8840How to cite this article: Duraimurugan K, Narendhran S, Manikandan M. DNA as a Biomaterial A food should be free from microbial contamination until it reaches the consumers table. All kind of safety measures must be ensured by industries to make it possible. But still microbes are found in food products by any source, leading to the spoilage of food product and causing food borne infections to the consumers. Home cooked food samples collected from the villages in Malawi has shown to be contaminated upto 35% of pathogenic microbes and by further investigation, it was found that contamination of food samples by poor handling and unhygienic conditions [11]. Microbial contamination is a crucial problem in various food industries causing major economic losses. Various industries like dairy, poultry industries follow various cutting-edge technologies to reduce the microbial contamination in end product [12,13]. Microbial contamination can be explored by various physical methods including microscopic and culture depend approaches. But these techniques have various limitations in the confirmation of microbial presence. In present decades, PCR based methods are highly adopted due to its high accuracy and reliability [14].In the present review, we discuss the utilization of DNA as an effective tool in ensuring the quality and safety in various foods and processed food products (Figure 1). DiscussionDifferent DNA isolation methods from food products [20]. Apart from the standard protocols and commercial kits, various modified protocols are also adopted by researchers in order to enhance the efficiency of quality and quantity of extracted DNA [21]. DNA based detection of adulteration and GMO in food productsMilk and milk products: Milk stands as a source of high protein based food for vegetarians around the world. Commercial milk is available in the f...