This month, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) disclosed that it now has a new scanning tool that can identify the entire DNA content of a food.
It is now possible to scan the entire DNA content of a food without any prior knowledge or suspicion of what may or may not be present in that food
A statement released by FSAI says that The analytical scanner tool can “proactively identify all the ingredients and their biological sources in a food.” Now, Irish food regulators believe they can thwart instances of food fraud and easily identify foods that have been improperly labeled.
The way the tool works is that it compares actual ingredients in a food–ingredients identified by their DNA profile–versus the ingredients that are displayed on the label. The relatively new DNA sequencing technology is known as next-generation sequencing.