Preventing food fraud: DNA-methylation patterns to identify organic food

The organic sector has had the largest growth rates in the food market for several years. This leads to an enhanced susceptibility to food fraud. Many attempts to develop a reliable method for detecting organic food have failed such as stable isotope analysis, pesticide screening, or vitamin and elemental assays. Reasons for this failure are the diversity of fertilization possibilities, cross-contamination, and contradictory scientific publications on this issue. This project aims at the detection of organic food based on DNA methylation patterns. The idea of using these epigenetic patterns as potential biomarkers has been successfully applied in medicine and animal biology, but it is unknown if these biomarkers can also reliably identify different growth conditions of plants.