Adulteration Identification of Citrus Juice by Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE)
YU-SHAN LIU AND YUAN-TAY SHYU*
Department of Horticulture, National Taiwan University, 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei City 106, Taiwan, R.O.C.
(Received: January 20, 2005; Accepted: November 14, 2005)
Abstract
trnL intron and trnL-trnF non-coding region have become powerful tools to identify plants species in the past few years. In this study, above two regions are used to identify oranges and mandarins via a variable DNA fragment in trnL intron. In order to identify the DNA, a primer pair was designed to amplify the variable fragments and the PCR products were analyzed by Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE). The method successfully detected other citrus juices mixed in all of the falsely claimed 100% orange juices. It is suggested that the method is useful to detect the adulteration of 100% pure orange juices.
Key words: trnL, DGGE, citrus, chloroplast