Abstract
In this paper, four different physical treatments (microwaves, heating by conduction, sonication and pressure autoclaving) were performed to degrade a pure DNA extract, and their influence on GMO quantification was studied. The aim was to check the hypothesis that processing of agrofood products results in a similar degradation rate for both the transgenic target and the specific target. Indeed we could observe that even if the used physical treatments could lead to a significant increase of C t values for both transgenic and specific targets, the resulting ΔC t remained stable. So, the main conclusion of the study is that the aforementioned hypothesis seems valid and thus a physical degradation of DNA will not affect the relative quantitation of the GMO content, provided that both the specific and transgenic targets have very similar size. A second important issue of the experiments performed was that DNA is a very robust molecule as it is extremely difficult to reach a mean size below 100 bp. The study also gives evidence of the importance of using small targets.
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Acknowledgements
This research was done within a Belgian research project (S-5952) financed by DG4 and DG6 of the former Belgian Federal Ministry of Agriculture. We thank V. Planchon and R. Oger of CRA-W (Biometry Unit) for their statistical help. We are grateful to Prof. D. Portetelle of the Faculté Universitaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Gembloux for giving us access to their sonication facility and to Mrs Dudfield for checking the English text.
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Debode, F., Janssen, E. & Berben, G. Physical degradation of genomic DNA of soybean flours does not impair relative quantification of its transgenic content. Eur Food Res Technol 226, 273–280 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00217-006-0536-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00217-006-0536-1