The development of molecular-genetic method for the identification of pomegranate juice adulteration

Pomegranate juice is in high demand due to its well antioxidant activity. Due to high cost price of pomegranate juice among ones made from grape and apple, there is a great reason for its industrial adulteration. To find addition of the apple or grape juice there is most common method based on quantification the malic and tartaric acids by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLS). But this method has some drawbacks. For identifying the presence of grape and apple juices in pome-granate one, development the polymerase chain-reaction method (PCR) based on selective DNA identification for plant species Vitis vinifera and Ma-lus domestica is an effective way to decrease the analysis cost. As the research objects the pome-granate, apple and grape juices, as well as the mixes thereof with the main component substitution up to 5 %, were taken. The samples have been made from fresh fruit and then been heated 5 minutes at 118 °С. DNA extraction was carried out by precipitation on sorbent. Due to genome maps analysis the primers specific for Vitis vinifera and Malus domestica have been defined and synthe-sized. In accordance with them, the amplification conditions have been optimized. By selected condi-tions and with defined primers the investigation of indistinctive DNA presence in the pomegranate juice has been done. Moreover, the possibility of PCR applying for identification the adulteration of pomegranate juice by apple and grape ones has been proved. Lower limit of detection was less than 5 %.