Innovative biomarker for authentication and qualitative assessment of dairy products

Food fraud, corresponding to any intentional action to deceive purchasers and gain an undue economical advantage, is estimated to result in a 10 to 65 billion US dollars/year economical cost worldwide. Dairy products, particularly cheeses with protected land- and tradition-related labels, are particularly affected as consumers are willing to pay more for traditional and typical products. To address this issue, it is important to have efficient methods of food authentication in place. In this elaborate a chemical, physical, and DNA-based methods that are currently being used for determining the origin of food, such as isotope and elemental fingerprinting, near-infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, metabarcoding, and metagenomics are reviewed. DNA-based methods, such as metabarcoding, showed good potential for origin authentication while isotope and elemental fingerprinting showed consistent accuracy in origin authentication. In the following study we used metagenomics to assess the impact of origin, biotic and abiotic factors on the diversity of mountain Caciotta cheese and found that origin played a major role but other factors also have an impact. Additionally, we noticed that viral communities presented high biodiversity and that showed potential in origin authentication. Lastly we employed a machine learning approached (sPLS-DA) to evaluate the performances of volatilome, bacterial, and viral communities in origin authentication.