Food quality control by RNA profiling (foodRNA)

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. State-of-the-art DNA-based tests yield limited information beyond what animal, plant and bacterial species constitute a given food product - and in some cases performing that task sub-optimally. Profiling RNA in food products can potentially yield important novel information that DNA-based tests cannot - including expression information that can be used to ensure food safety and quality and detect food fraud. 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, allowing upscaling in food quality control. We will provide our product as a service to national food control agencies (which we already collaborate with) 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.