`Olive Identification Gets Fast and Easy - Olive Oil Times

Olive Identification Gets Fast and Easy

By Naomi Tupper
Mar. 14, 2012 09:51 UTC

New DNA iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tech­niques used by the University of Córdoba to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between dif­fer­ent olive vari­eties are much faster and more accu­rate than pre­vi­ous iden­ti­fi­ca­tion meth­ods.

The uni­ver­sity and their spin-off com­pany, IDolive, have always been at the fore­front of olive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. However, pre­vi­ously this meant com­par­ing olive pits with those in their large col­lec­tion to deter­mine the type, a time-con­sum­ing process car­ried out by a res­i­dent expert.

Although this process is still used and the col­lec­tion of pits con­tin­ues to be expanded, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of unknown sam­ples is now being made using mol­e­c­u­lar mark­ers, specif­i­cally through the use of microsatel­lites and PCR (poly­merase chain reac­tion) tech­niques.

Microsatellites are seg­ments of repeat­ing DNA that are highly vari­able in a given area of any genome. Hence by iden­ti­fy­ing the amount of microsatel­lites in an area, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion can be made between vari­eties of a species. Microsatellites in the unknown sam­ples are com­pared with those present in the data­base of the Pomology Group in the Department of Agronomy.

This data­base con­tains 500 dif­fer­ent vari­eties of olive, from 22 coun­tries, and allows easy and accu­rate iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of olive vari­etals. The results not only pro­vide infor­ma­tion about the his­tory of a tree or olive grow­ing area, but also a con­fir­ma­tion of the authen­tic­ity of par­tic­u­lar olive plants.

Varietal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in the olive indus­try. Correct iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of plants before com­mer­cial prop­a­ga­tion is essen­tial as errors can only be iden­ti­fied sev­eral years after cul­ti­va­tion. Plants are expen­sive, so rather than risk grow­ing a crop of the wrong vari­ety, it is incred­i­bly use­ful to be sure of the type before plant­ing.

Californian olive oil indus­try con­sul­tant Alexandra Kicenik Devarenne applauded the project say­ing, Olives are such an ancient crop — and the trees have such long pro­duc­tive lives — that we con­tin­u­ally run into the ques­tion, I know the trees are over a hun­dred years old and make great oil, but what vari­ety of olive is it really?’ It gen­er­ates all sorts of inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about the ori­gins of the trees in var­i­ous locales.”

Similar DNA tech­nol­ogy is also used by IDolive to iden­tify pathogens in olive plants. The absence of par­tic­u­lar pathogens is required by leg­is­la­tion in order to obtain cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of plants by Spanish Royal Decree.

IDolive pro­vides a fast iden­ti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice, where the cus­tomer sim­ply fills out the online appli­ca­tion form and sends the sam­ple to be iden­ti­fied to the Department of Agronomía at the University of Córdoba. Results of the analy­sis are then sent to the cus­tomer within twenty days of receiv­ing the sam­ple. The cost is $140 per sam­ple iden­ti­fied.

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