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March 4, 2004 — Want to know the true identity of that mystery meat in today’s funky-smelling lunch special, or whether your vegetarian meal is actually animal-product free?
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According to French biological diagnostics company bioMerieux, the FoodExpert-ID biochip is the first high-throughput gene chip for testing food and animal feed.
Based on DNA microarray technology from partner Affymetrix Inc. (Nasdaq: AFFX, News, Web) of Santa Clara, Calif., the device is not actually aimed at consumers, but at the food and animal feed industries in the United States and Europe, which must meet increasingly stringent standards for what is actually in the products they sell.
In the wake of the recent mad cow disease incident in the United States, policy-makers and regulators are calling for better methods of monitoring the content of feed provided to cattle, pigs, chickens and other commercially raised animals. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, is believed to be spread when remnants of the brains and nervous systems of infected cattle find their way into the feed other cows consume.
In February, scientists reported finding a new strain of the disease in two Italian cows. Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture acknowledged that it had recalled 38,000 pounds of affected meat, more than four times the 10,400 pounds it originally said it had recovered.
Meanwhile, the recent outbreak of avian flu in Asia, which killed dozens of people and spread to flocks of chickens in the United States, has focused attention on an additional need for better meat monitoring. The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million cases of food borne illness occur in the United States every year, claiming 5,000 lives and costing $7.7 billion dollars.
In some cases just knowing that a sample may contain animal contaminants, and which kinds, could prevent or detect the source of disease. bioMerieux reports that its new device can recognize the DNA of 33 different species of mammals, fish and birds.
Of course, even with less-controversial foods, consumers cannot always trust that the “all-beef” hot dogs they may be buying are cow and nothing but the cow, or that a package of crab dumplings isn’t actually fake crustacean made with fish and food dye.
Affymetrix and bioMerieux don’t have the food chip business entirely to themselves. In 2003, Agilent Technologies Inc. launched its AgBiotech business program to extend its microarray and microfluidic expertise into the agricultural and food safety industries. The first product in the new program was a microarray kit for studying the genome of rice and a fungus called rice blast, or Magnaporthe grisea, that destroys enough rice to feed 60 million people a year.
A biochip and lab kit from Agilent has also been used to check for the presence and concentration of genetically modified soybean or corn. While European legislation calls for food labels to identify genetically modified ingredients, products that have small amounts of soy or corn are more difficult to measure accurately.
The total market for biochips was around $500 million in 2003, analyst Aaron Geist recently told BusinessWeek. Affymetrix has a commanding lead in the sector, with a 70 percent market share, but faces growing competition from upstarts including Illumina Inc.. The San Diego-based company recently developed a chip that contains six copies of the entire human genome.
While the debate over genetically modified food continues, in Thailand, scientists are turning to nanotechnology to improve the quality of rice without splicing in foreign genes. At the Fast Neutron Research Facility, part of Chiang Mai University, physicists are using particle beams to drill a hole through a rice cell a few nanometers in diameter. Next, a nitrogen atom is fired into the rice DNA to modify its characteristics. The scientists are aiming to develop a strain of rice that is less sensitive to sunlight and has shorter stems.
As for the FoodExpert-ID chip, bioMerieux hopes its meat detector will be utilized throughout the food processing chain, so that the source of contamination, when one occurs, can be traced. The company said that the chip has been tested on 500 different food and feed products and expects government trials to begin by the end of the year in France, England and the Netherlands.