快猫短视频

BRITISH supermarkets may soon have to resort to sensitive genetic tests if
they want to reassure customers who are worried about eating genetically
engineered products. But even the best current tests could let through a small
percentage of modified material.

In November, British retailers voluntarily agreed that all foods containing
soya or maize from the US鈥攚here no effort is made to separate engineered
from conventional crops鈥攕hould carry a label warning that the product 鈥渕ay
contain鈥� genetically modified ingredients.

But those labels might alarm some customers, and many retailers would like to
offer products labelled as being free of genetically engineered ingredients. A
spokesman for the Sainsbury鈥檚 supermarket chain told 快猫短视频 that
it is looking into this possibility.

The government will demand that such claims can be verified. And for the past
three years, the recently privatised Laboratory of the Government Chemist (LGC)
in west London has been developing tests to do this job for the Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). LGC鈥檚 tests identify characteristic DNA
sequences that flank the genes introduced into a range of engineered crops.

For raw and lightly processed foodstuffs the tests may be sufficiently
sensitive to meet the supermarkets鈥� needs. The current test for modified soya
beans produces a positive result if there is just one engineered bean in 100
beans. But for heavily processed foods, more work is needed to produce tests
reliable enough to convince MAFF that food can be labelled as free from
genetically engineered material.