Don't Judge a Bottle by its Label

Don't Judge A Bottle By Its Label

Ginko - Yeah, I didn't know what it looked like either...

Don't judge a book by its cover, or so the saying goes. This is especially true when the title of the book has nothing to do with the topic, who would guess Moby Dick was about a whale? You might wanna throw a picture of a whale on the cover there Melville, just so people don't get confused! That's why its easy with herbal supplements, the label tells you exactly what's in the bottle, if you buy a bottle a ginko root, boom it says it right on the bottle!

It turns out it might not be that simple. A recent study published in BMC Medicine used DNA barcoding techniques to look at the actual contents of 44 herbal supplements and compared them to their living relatives.To do this, researchers must extract the DNA, amplify a small region of the DNA which contains changes unique to that species (like a barcode on a box of cereal, get it?!), then sequence the DNA to see the specific changes and identify the species. In the case of the ginko root, the researchers found it was contaminated by black walnut, the nerve!

This paper has received a lot of attention, and not necessarily all of it positive. There have been calls to have the paper retracted saying that the use of DNA barcoding is not the appropriate technique for this application and that the researchers made errors while doing so. The critics also call for a more stringent peer review process to ensure that the appropriate changes are made to the paper.

DNA barcoding is a fairly well established technique. It is less onerous and time consuming than RFLP and can be used to deliver high quality reliable results. Not only that but the critics have used DNA barcoding in their own, similar studies. Not to mention that BMC Medicine does require publications to be peer reviewed by two "experts" in the field which is fairly standard for medical journals. Maybe the critics are upset because they can no longer think about their daily ginko hit in the same way...

Studies like this one are becoming more and more common, and the criticisms are just as common. The new generation of genomic techniques has enabled us to look at things at the finest levels. However, the techniques leading up to analysis have not changed, DNA extraction and PCR remain largely the same since the techniques were first described. To push the industry forward, liquid handling robotics enable faster, more precise preparation of samples and help push from raw input to results faster. For more information, take a look here.

Read the original paper in BMC Medicine: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/222

Find out more about Aurora: www.aurorabiomed.com