Detection of Substitution/Adulteration in Tea and Coffee using Genomics

Funding period: 2023-2024

Lead: Amit Mathews

Total GRDI funding: $8,000

Many cases of food fraud involve crops grown for profit, as the high earnings can be a big incentive. Tea and coffee are two of the most profitable crops and are popular worldwide. The project proposes to identify and differentiate tea and coffee from common adulterants using DNA barcoding technology targeting specific genes (matK and rbcL) and genomic regions (ITS-2 and trnH-psbA). This testing will accurately identifies both tea and coffee. The proposed screening and confirmation tests can distinguish tea and coffee from contaminating plant material and closely related species. This method can be very useful from a regulatory point of view for these priority commodities due to their high risk of market fraud.