Food quality control by RNA profiling (foodRNA)

Introduction

The field of food quality control is important to all consumers, ensuring food safety and detecting food substitutions and fraud. Next-generation sequencing has the potential to revolutionize the field, but practical solutions are lagging behind.

Current Limitations

State-of-the-art DNA-based tests yield limited information beyond what animal, plant, and bacterial species constitute a given food product. In some cases, these tests perform this task sub-optimally.

Advantages of RNA Profiling

Profiling RNA in food products can potentially yield important novel information that DNA-based tests cannot. This includes:

1. Expression information that can be used to ensure food safety and quality.
2. Detection of food fraud.

Project Focus

With a focus on plant-based food products, we will develop, optimize, and set up tests that will be substantially cheaper and more sensitive than the state-of-the-art. This will allow for upscaling in food quality control.

Collaboration and Future Demand

We will provide our product as a service to national food control agencies, with whom we already collaborate, and also to high-end food producers as an accreditation service.

We foresee that as consumer awareness increases, the demand for these tests will increase exponentially in the future.