GM foods are products that contain, consist of or are produced from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). The possible presence of GMOs in the food chain raises great environmental, health, ethic, socio-economic and political interest to the bodies that are responsible for control and certification, and for compliance of food products with quality standards. In this context, the aim of this work was to develop an analytical tool for the most accurate analysis of soy content in complex matrices. In particular, the experiment involved nine laboratories and made it possible to validate a Real Time PCR method using two different samples containing respectively 5 and 1.5% of soy. Overall, the results show a good level of reproducibility of the proposed method. However, the low correlation (especially in the case of the sample with less soy content) between the data provided by different laboratories may be due to different factors such as the reference materials in use, the homogeneity of prepared samples, the different manual skill of the operators involved in the analysis, the composition and technological treatments associated with the different production stages of the tested matrices. In summary, though, the work represents a possible approach, not yet deepened, to resolve the problem of quantification of soy in foods consisting of heterogeneous matrices.
Bibliography
F. Ciarrocchi et al., Sanità Pubblica Veterinaria, 73, August 2012, 8-15
