Guoliang Li

School of Food Science and Engineering, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, Xi’an, 710021, China

Economically motivated animal-derived food adulteration has become the focus and difficulty of food authenticity supervision. Currently, the most effective detection technology is DNA analysis. However, the existing DNA detection methods mainly rely on sophisticated instruments and strict operating environments for nucleic acid amplification, and on-site rapid detection technologies are scarce. The bottleneck is how to identify and convert trace adulterated DNA in complex matrices into portable and readable signals. Inspired by the target specific recognition and efficient trans-cleavage activity of CRISPR/Cas12a system, we first introduced it into animal-derived food authenticity detection. Through innovative design and signal encoding of non-target nucleic acid substrates, the trace adulterated DNA signals were cleverly transformed into highly sensitive fluorescence, Raman signals, or portable colorimetric signals, achieving effective detection of low adulteration rates in complicated animal-derived food matrices. The developed technologies not only meet the demands of portable animal-derived food authenticity detection, but also provide novel approaches for on-site rapid detection of other biomarkers.