Much of food fraud is through admixture of components that should not be present. For example adding peanut to almond butter, or in a classical example adding horse meat to beef. Being able to screen for both identity and purity is what Genome2-ID does best. As an example, the graph below shows admixture of almond (Punus dulcis) with peanut (Arachis hypogaea). In a simulation using DNA data, a mixture of 95% almond with 5% peanut suggested a 92:8 ratio – a very close to exact match.

Testing systems that use only confirmation of the presence of a single product, like qPCR, will fail to observe this. The value of metagenomic approaches with Genome2-ID are that they capture both identity and purity in a single assay.