Evaluating the usefulness of next-generation sequencing for herb authentication

Area of Science:

• Food science
• Genomics
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Food authentication is crucial due to rising concerns about food quality and safety.
• Herbal products are susceptible to fraud and adulteration, necessitating reliable identification methods.
• Current DNA barcoding techniques face limitations in distinguishing closely related species.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a metagenomics approach for authenticating herbal ingredients in plant-derived products.
• To create a customized DNA barcode database and bioinformatics pipeline for enhanced accuracy.
• To address the limitations of existing DNA barcoding methods for species resolution.

Main Methods:

• Development of a customized DNA barcode database and bioinformatics pipeline (Herbs Authenticity).
• Implementation of a metagenomics approach for plant-derived product authenticity testing.
• Evaluation of pipeline accuracy using public plant genomes, databases (iBOL, ENA), and de novo sequenced genomes.

Main Results:

• The developed pipeline accurately identified main components in diverse plant-derived samples.
• Accuracy was influenced by sample type and barcode selection, with variable noise levels observed.
• Metagenomics utility is currently constrained by the availability of reference sequences and required sequencing depth.

Conclusions:

• The customized metagenomics approach shows significant potential for herbal product authentication.
• Further refinement is needed to enhance qualitative and quantitative accuracy for practical application.
• Improving reference sequence databases and sequencing depth will increase the method's reliability.