A new approach for tracing adulteration of saffron with safflower by universal barcoding primers

Saffron adulteration dates back to antiquity a fraudulent act continued to modern day. In recent years the wide use of saffron in medicine and food has been associated with wider use of counterfeit to saffron, nevertheless this has been associated with development of methods to detect such adulteration.

The advancement of molecular biology methods has been one of key area used for detection of adulterants. The concept by its own is diverse and different approaches for better detection of adulterant has been developed to support detection of fraudulent activities in particular in food and agriculture industry.

To develop primers for detection of saffron adulteration with safflower we designed primer pairs based on universal reference sequence for chloroplast trnl(UUA) Intron that are different in length and size for saffron and sawfflower.

The approach was to save tedious work using otherwise RAPD/SCAR (sequenced characterized amplified region)markers to have accurate reproducible results with least interference and higher level of polymorphism of particular and specific conserved region in plants.