NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Irish DNA tracing firm IdentiGen said today that the Irish government's Department of Business, Enterprise, and Innovation has awarded it a €1.8 million ($2 million) research and development grant.
The Dublin-based firm will use the funding to further develop genomic technologies to assess the origin, quality, and safety of food. It plans to partner with University College Dublin's Animal Genomics Laboratory to lower the cost of the DNA analysis and make the technology widely available.
"Food labeling is a major cost to industry and has been shown to be vulnerable to abuse and fraud," Ciarán Meghen, IdentiGen's managing director and founder, said in a statement. "IdentiGen has identified an approach to transform and industrialize the use of DNA profiling in food labeling."