The presence of ingredients derived from GMO in
food products in the market place is subjected to national
regulations. The decree 4.680 of April 24th,
2003 stipulates that the product should be labeled as
containing GMO ingredients, unless the GMO content
is due to adventitious and unintended contamination
with GMO-derived material and does not exceed 1%
along. With the introduction of this mandatory regulation,
there has been increasing demand on testing laboratories
to develop or adopt qualitative and quantitative
methods to assure compliance.
Through our results we can conclude that the DNA
extraction method used was satisfactory for most of
the products analyzed and the screening and constructspecific
methods for GMO detection can be applied to
different processed food such as powdered soy milk,
cookies, texturized soy protein, products of maize meals,
pasta, sausages, dehydrated soups, soy beverage with
fruits, raw soybeans and pet food.
These results clearly demonstrate the presence of
genetically modified soybean in the Brazilian food market
reinforcing the need for development of quantitative
methods in routine analyses for enforcement of the
introduced labelling threshold for GMO in food
products