You can’t always trust what’s on your plate. According to some estimates, up to 20 percent of food consumed around the world has been subjected to food fraud, an increasingly pervasive issue that costs the global food industry tens of billions of dollars annually.
Now, researchers from A*STAR have developed an innovative quantitative method to accurately characterise and profile meat samples to ensure the authenticity of food products. Researcher Zach Pang led a team that’s pioneering the use of glycomics in food science, an approach that examines the structure, composition and function of sugar molecules called glycans attached to proteins in meat.
According to Pang, the idea started out as an exploratory experiment to characterise meat sources through methods such as mass spectrometry. “It was not funded by grants at the time. I was exploring this using equipment on core fund, and buying meat samples out of my own pocket,” Pang remarked.
Pang was surprised to discover that glycomics turned out to be a viable method of distinguishing between meat samples from different species. “We found very profound differences between species,” he said, adding that in their study, the team described distinct glycan profiles in samples of beef, pork and chicken.
Pang and colleagues found that glycan molecules called N-Glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc) and alpha-galactose (α-gal) are the key to unlocking the origins of a meat sample. As detailed in the study, beef and pork contain unique Neu5Gc α-gal profiles, but they are completely absent in chicken, making them valuable markers for verifying food authenticity.
“The beautiful thing about a glycomics approach is that we can actually measure the magnitude of the expression,” commented Pang. “This is not possible with other methods.” For example, advanced analytical techniques such as ultra-performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence-mass spectrometry (UPLC-FLR-MS) can help researchers detect minute amounts of a particular glycan present in a meat sample to measure its purity.
Pang warns that though glycomics may not yet verify food identity with perfect accuracy, it has great potential for combating food fraud and ensuring product authenticity in the meat industry. The use of glycomics can also be extended to other high-value biotechnology industries such as lab-grown meats to provide a powerful quality control tool.
The team is currently working on scaling up the technology for commercial applications by developing a cost-effective, paper-based diagnostic chip for food screening.
The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this study are from the Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI) and the Institute of Bioengineering and Bioimaging (IBB).
