Spray-on DNA bar codes could detect pathogens on produce

Stephanie Lee of the San Francisco Chronicle, writes that to prevent and contain outbreaks of food-borne illness, which sicken 1 in 6

spray.on.dna.produceAmericans annually, a Bay Area startup is developing bar codes that go directly on fruits and vegetables. But you may overlook them: they’re DNA-size.

Using technology invented at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DNATrek is creating liquids that each contain a unique DNA sequence. The odorless, colorless and tasteless solution peppers the surface of produce, or blends into other oils and liquids, with a genetic bar code that can be identified by a special machine.

The technology could solve the enormous challenge of tracing an outbreak’s source — the places where food items are grown, packed and shipped. When people start feeling the symptoms of salmonella or E. coli, many clues about the contaminated product’s origins, such as the shipment boxes, already have disappeared.

The Food and Drug Administration has already recognized the invention as a safe food additive, but for now, the industry does not use it. After large-scale tests that are set to begin next year, DNATrek believes that its tool will emerge as a powerful weapon against food-borne illnesses, which cost the country an estimated $150 billion a year in health-related expenses, and counterfeit food products, which cost the global industry $10 billion to $15 billion annually.

DNATrek suggests that its bar codes may have come in handy in 2012, when an E. coli outbreak caused by contaminated spinach led 13 people to be hospitalized, and in 2011, when 33 Americans died after eating tainted cantaloupe. “If there’s a problem at home and there’s a piece of the cantaloupe left, you can pick it out of the trash, you can scrub the surface, and all the available information is there and you know exactly where it came from,” said Anthony Zografos, founder and CEO of the self-funded, three-employee startup that expects to close a round of seed funding by the end of the month.

Safety concerns

George Farquar, a physical chemist at Lawrence Livermore, patented the product in 2010 with about $3 million in research funding from the Department of Defense. Originally conceived as a biodefense tool, it combines FDA-approved foodstuffs, such as sugar, and a unique DNA sequence to create safe, inhalable microparticles for the purposes of tracking airflow indoors and outdoors. It has been used to test whether, for instance, air detection systems are able to notice particles that resemble anthrax. Last week, company executives and scientists traveled to the Pentagon to run their third series of tests.

If Michigan can track cattle birth to plate, why not add food safety info?

Cattle in Michigan have been electronically tagged and tracked since 2010 in a bid to control bovine tuberculosis.

According to NPR, whenever a steer or cow leaves a farm in Michigan, or goes to a slaughterhouse, it passes by a tag reader, and its ID number goes to a central computer that keeps track of every animal’s location.

If an animal is discovered to be sick, “we can track that animal all the way back, through every herd that it’s been in, through any sale yard it’s been cow-meatthrough, back to the farm of origin,” said Steve Halstead, Michigan’s state veterinarian.

“There’s a large number of people that would like to know where their food comes from, just understand that better,” says Daniel Buskirk, an expert on the beef industry at Michigan State University.

He’s using the university’s own herd of cattle to experiment with ways to track those animals and then make information about them available to shoppers in the store.

“This is one way that we can hopefully kind of connect the story of how this food is being produced with the consumers who are consuming it,” Buskirk says.

Last year, when 72 of the university’s steers went to the slaughterhouse, Buskirk set up a system that transferred the identity of each animal from its electronic ID tag to a new set of tags — little square bar codes.

Those bar codes were pinned to the carcass. And as butchers went to work on it, cutting it into smaller pieces, they used a little handheld device to scan that first bar code and print new ones for each new cut of meat. In this case, the meat just went to the university’s food service, not a grocery store.

But the same system eventually could produce a label that would go on a package of meat in the store. “Then if you have a smartphone,” Buskirk says, “I can scan that two-dimensional bar code, and it will give information about the origin of that beef.”

In the case of the meat that went to Michigan’s food service, it showed an aerial picture of the farm. But in theory, the label could link to any qr.code.rest.inspection.gradeinformation at all. It could tell consumers “what goes on at the farm, how the animals might be cared for, how they might be fed,” Buskirk says.

Even better, microbial food safety data and interventions used to reduce the risk of dangerous pathogens.

Technology is also changing the business of restaurant inspection disclosure

Government Technology reports that a new national open data standard, called the Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification, was created. To enable any city to voluntarily share restaurant inspection scores on Yelp or other websites to make that data more transparent.



On the mobile app front, Sacramento County, Calif., and other municipalities are releasing smartphone apps that will make looking up inspection scores easier.



Launched in late 2011, the Sacramento County Food Facilities Inspections app shows a person’s current location in the county and nearby retail food facilities, which are marked on a map and on a list. The color of the markers on the map indicate the most recent food inspection result, inspection date and links to more detailed information.

Food inspection data refreshes daily and is complete for all food facilities in the county, including restaurants, bars, grocery stories, convenience stores, school cafeterias and most facilities that dispense food to the public.