Unlocking the Power of Digital PCR for Food Safety and Authenticity

Join our live webinar to gain insight into SGS’s portfolio of digital PCR methods to address food safety and authenticity issues in key areas and much more.

Overview

In the complex food supply chain, testing plays a key role in ensuring compliance. For food and feed samples, GMO regulations are non-harmonized, making GMO testing critical to differentiate between authorized and unauthorized materials, evaluate safety and purity and aid in traceability and labeling. Additionally, verifying meat species authenticity in highly processed food samples addresses not only labeling requirements, but also ethical, sociological and religious concerns.

DNA-based methods offer advantages over other approaches when testing highly processed food samples, as they can detect components that may degrade and become untraceable. Numerous methods, primarily using real-time PCR, have been proposed due to its heightened sensitivity compared to endpoint PCR and the suitability of smaller amplicons to highly fragmented DNA. However, the low yield and highly fragmented DNA in food samples, coupled with a high content of inhibitors, can adversely affect the PCR reaction, leading to false negatives.

Digital PCR (dPCR) was developed to overcome these issues. As a third-generation PCR technology, it offers improved precision, sensitivity and absolute quantification of the target. In dPCR, the total volume of the reaction is divided into thousands of partitions. A Poisson distribution is then applied to the binary signal indicating positive versus negative partitions, to obtain an absolute quantification. This partitioning of the reaction volume makes the dPCR method more accurate and robust, less prone to bias and more tolerant to inhibitors. Moreover, its high multiplexing potential and lack of calibration curve requirements for quantification ultimately reduce costs compared to real-time PCR.

Recently, SGS has focused on the development and validation of dPCR solutions, adhering to specific guidelines on ISO 20395:2019(E): Biotechnology — Requirements for evaluating the performance of quantification methods for nucleic acid target sequences — qPCR and dPCR. SGS offers a wide portfolio of dPCR methods to address food safety and authenticity issues in four key areas – GMO screening, pathogen detection, meat speciation and allergen detection. Additional testing methods will be available soon, enabling SGS to better fulfil customers’ needs.

Objective

During this webinar, attendees will learn about digital PCR applications in food testing and gain an overview of SGS digital PCR testing services.

Agenda

• Overview of dPCR technology
• SGS dPCR testing capabilities
• Case studies on the use of dPCR
• Q&A