Lamb, beef or chicken? 30min test promises to identify mystery meat

Funding for AltraTech comes on the day that the UK Food Standards Agency announced an additional programme of priority testing of lamb dishes from British takeaway restaurants following evidence of on-going substitution of lamb with cheaper meats such as beef and chicken.

The disposable DNA diagnostics kit – dubbed BeadCAP - uses standard digital CMOS semiconductors, which company CEO Tim Cummins said circumvents issues associated with gold or platinum chips, such as manufacturing difficulties, or lack of availability in production foundries. It also greatly reduces the current two-to-five days required to obtain results, a timeframe that can incur costly quarantine or recalls.

‘This is the Achilles heel of most other attempts at electrochemical detection of DNA over the years,’ he told The Engineer via email. ‘Capacitance sensing with standard digital CMOS chips is much simpler, and more amenable to high accuracy, high volume, and low cost.’

Cummins said AltraTech is in the process of developing the system in the lab with three test tubes, magnetic beads, dual-specific primer reagents, and a silicon chip capacitive detector.