High-Throughput Sequencing for the Authentication of Food Products: Problems and Perspectives

The quality of food products is one of the key factors affecting health, life expectancy, and work capacity. An important quality parameter is compliance with the claimed composition, the violation of which can lead to negative repercussion for purchasers which is a risk of allergic reactions and toxic and other side effects. To control the composition in most cases, organoleptic, macro- and microscopic, analytical chemistry methods are used. Molecular methods based on amplification and fluorescence detection of marker DNA fragments, as well as approaches based on mass spectrometry, are also employed. However, owing to certain limitations, such as insufficient sensitivity and incompleteness of the databases used, these methods often do not allow for an accurate analysis of multicomponent mixtures. At present, this problem becomes more urgent because of the rapid development of processing technologies of raw ingredients for the food industry, as well as the globalization of food markets, which leads to the need for development of new approaches to solve this problem. An important addition to the existing methods can become high-throughput sequencing technologies (so-called new generation sequencing, NGS), which allow fast and cheap determination of hundreds of millions of DNA fragments. In this review, the possibilities and prospects of their use for controlling the composition of food products are considered.