Any chicken in those nuggets? New commercial application for DNA microarrays

"HAS your chicken been bulked up with beef or pork extracts? Is that expensive albacore tuna really cheap skipjack tuna? Did rats, mice or even bits of people fall into the mincer when your burger was being made? And are unscrupulous companies risking spreading mad cow disease by adding beef to cattle feed?
All these questions can now be answered by a single test that reveals the presence of meat from any of 32 different species in food samples.

The test, based on a DNA chip, is being evaluated by food regulatory authorities in Europe, and could also be used by supermarkets and food companies to check on their suppliers.

"The beauty of this is that you can scan for so many things at once," says Thomas Schlumberger, director of clinical genetics at Affymetrix in California, which developed the "FoodExpert-ID" chip together with bioMérieux of France."

Andy Coghlan, DNA chip will catch beefed up chicken, New Scientist. 6 March 2004

(Thanks to Kristofer Hallen for the pointer)

March 7, 2004 | Filed Under business, genomic-data, sequencing-technology | Comments Off 

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