The Department of Botany at UCD likes to keep its students busy in the real world, and involves them in projects that might make a commercial enterprise. Third year undergraduates each year are set a problem and asked to see if they can make it work.
"What use is science unless you can use it," explained Prof Matt Harmey of the Department of Botany. This year's project involved putting together a simple test for the presence of genetically modified plant material in food products.
The students and their organisers, department head Prof Martin Steer, Prof Harmey and Dr Tommy Gallagher may, however, now have a Celtic Tiger by the tail. Their polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test seems to work well and has proven itself with tomato and soya flour products and could as a result have significant market potential if it could be commercialised.
There is considerable pressure on governments to establish reliable testing for genetically modified (GM) foods given public disquiet and the shambles which passes as labelling procedures currently being handed down by the EU. Labelling would be meaningless unless validated by testing, hence the need for reliable tests.
The great difficulty has been that virtually no DNA or genetic material manages to survive through the processing of some products, Prof Harmey explained, notably processed vegetable oils and sugar. Even so, the EU Commission has promised to deliver such a test for these products, and scientists are now searching for any tell-tale sign that would indicate the presence of a modified ingredient in any circumstance.
Prof Harmey and his students have taken a slightly different approach, applying well established technology to products that do not undergo such heavy refinement and hence which are likely to retain some trace of genetic material from a GM source.
These are also the general consumer products such as tomato paste and foods which contain soya flour or maize which most concern the public. The UCD assay, which is still undergoing testing, seems to work well, Prof Harmey said, so much so that the students are now trying to establish the market potential for such an assay.
The whole thing works because any producer trying to introduce a GM product must give the regulatory authorities the details of the modification. "It is the use [of the GM food] not the information which is patented," Prof Harmey said.
This provides would-be testers with a selection of genetic tracers, for example the "promoter" genetic sequence which acts like a switch to turn on the modification, the sequence of the modification itself or the genetic sequence which helps to prove that the modification is actually working.
"You can find these things using PCR," he said. "Once [any ingredient] contains DNA you can find it no matter how little. We can detect the modified DNA that has been put in."
The key to the test however is having extremely exacting controls and procedures because of the power of PCR. Even the smallest amount of DNA can contaminate a sample and confuse a test. "It is the procedures we want and the controls. You can't go in and swear [accuracy] without them."
With PCR, you create a genetic sequence which complements the one you hope to find and then add it to the sample. This is heated and cooled in a sequence of steps that allows the sequences to find one another, bind, break and then recombine, amplifying the quantity of the target DNA each time. It only works if the target DNA is present.
`This is standard technology. I am not sure why someone hasn't already gone about it," Prof Harmey said. He is unsure however whether there is a market for the GM food test procedures established by the project work. This is under assessment by the students, he said, who are visiting supermarkets and other potential users.
The procedures as developed so far actually work, he said, although more work needed to be done to provide good data on accuracy. It was only a yes or no test for the presence of a genetic sequence, he added, although the group is now also looking at how they might discover the quantities of genetic material present in a sample.
This may be work for next autumn's third years, he said. While the activity might in time grow into a company, he and his academic colleagues are more interested in what the students take from the exercise. "It is a good learning process," he said.