Hello, and good day! There is not any category close to “GMO contamination in food”, so I post it here, hoping to get info from anyone here having experience handling this. Firstly, on the nature of food / raw material sample that I intend to test:
It is NOT intended to contain GMO, but there is risk of it being contaminated by GMO. Purpose of test: To test the food / raw material for GMO contamination, and if present, to validate the GMO quantity against regulatory limits (for example, maximum 3 % GMO to be exempted from labelling). These limits differ from one country to another. There are lots of general information online. I would like to ask about some specifics: The right tests to choose.
The test strategy recommended to me by a lab is:
i. First, GMO screening for primers
(I hope I used the right terminology here, by primers I mean the p35s, FMV, tNOS, AgroBorder, etc.)
ii. If screening positive,
based on which of the primers is/are positive,
screen for possible, relevant event-specific identification.
iii. Whichever event-specific identification returns positive results, quantify it.
(My initial difficulty is with this step.) Any GMO quantification is going to return a RELATIVE result!
(So how to validate that the absolute quantity of positive GMO, say, soya or maize, do not exceed regulatory limit?)
And the step (iii.) recommended to me is,
quantify the botanical species (for example, soya or maize as a whole).
If species quantification results are Not Detected (<0.1%),
and since this is inclusive of GMO and non-GMO traits of the species,
we can conclude that whatever GMO that contaminates our product is insignificant despite the positive screening (results from step i.).
Can anyone share if you went through the same strategy above, or do you know of any faster way to achieve absolute GMO-contaminant quantification in food (i.e., that can be validated directly against regulatory limits)?
Lab accredited for absolute GMO quantification.
All labs where I live are accredited for GMO screening only (step i. above).
I contacted labs via emails (found in their website), only Eurofin and SGS replied they provide accredited GMO-quantification in food.
Do you know of any other lab accredited for GMO-contaminants quantification in food? Do share their direct contact(s).
Understanding the meaning of mLOD, pLOD, pLOQ for GMO-contaminant test in food.
On this subject, I got some explanation from labs, but I do not really understand it. I failed to find any resource online with examples specific to food products. Can anyone share some resource on this subject?
Thank you.