Olive oil, in addition to its nutritional value and unique organoleptic characteristics, offers multiple health benefits thanks to the abundance of bioactive compounds. Identifying the origin of the cultivar is an important and challenging task. Methods based on metabolite profile changes between olive cultivars require advanced spectroscopy and chromatography instrumentation together with powerful chemometric tools.
Molecular methods are the most accurate, because DNA is not influenced by environmental conditions, soil composition and harvest time, but they also require advanced instrumentation.such as sequencing, capillary electrophoresis, and flow cytometry with laser-induced fluorescence detection.
DNA analysis on olive oil against fraud: increase precision
Contrary to all reported methods, Greek researchers have developed DNA detection devices for olive oil cultivar verification, which are single-use, multi-analytical sensors that allow simultaneous detection of variety-specific combinations of multiple alleles.
The method includes PCR amplification, DNA polymerase-guided allele discrimination, and application on devices where fragments are captured via hybridization and visualized by antibody-functionalized gold nanoparticles that generate an 8-point color string for 8 alleles.
L’accuracy of the method It was evaluated with 7 olive cultivars and the results were in full agreement with the sequencing data.
The proposed strategy could find broader applications for cultivar origin traceability of important agri-food products.
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