Food Tracking perspective: DNA metabarcoding toidentify composition in complex and processed foodproducts.. metabarcoding food tracking

One of the main goal of the quality control evaluation is to identify contaminants in raw material, or contamination after a food is processed and before it is placed on the market. During the treatment processes, contamination, both accidental and economically motivated, can generate incongruence between declared and real composition. In our study, we evaluated if DNA metabarcoding is a suitable tool for unveiling the composition of processed food, even when it contains small trace amounts. We tested this method on different types of commercial plant products by using \textit{tnr}L marker and we applied amplicon-based high-throughput sequencing techniques to identify plant components in different food products. Our results showed that DNA metabarcoding can be an effective approach for food traceability in different type of processing food since, in the vast majority of our samples, we identified the species composition as the labels reported. However, some critical issues still exist, mostly deriving from the starting composition (i.e. variable complexity in taxa composition) of the sample itself and the different processing level (i.e. high or low DNA degradation), but our data confirmed the potential of DNA metabarcoding approach also in quantitative analyses for food composition quality control.