Clear Labs seeks contaminated food with the aid of DNA
Food analytics company, Clear Labs, trying to change the outdated manufacturing techniques of food suppliers. The company had  previously been receiving samples from the US markets and analysing them in order to increase the size of its genetic database. It now claims to have the largest database for food genetic markets in the world. 

Seeing the contents of the freezer at Clear Labs, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled into a college dorm room. Stacked high with Ziplocs, it's stocked with seemingly every frozen food known to man: microwaveable burgers, chicken bacon ranch sandwiches, mozzarella sticks. It's not all that different from a freezer at your typical Bay Area startup, actually—except this food isn't for eating. It's for analyzing.

Clear Labs is a food analytics company, and those stacks of frozen food are its ticket to the big time. For the past two years, the company has been collecting samples from markets in the United States and analyzing them to expand its genetic collection. Now the company claims it has the world's largest database of food genetic markers. And it wants to use that data to change how manufacturers manage the food supply.

For more than a decade, scientists have been using genetic markers like these, also called DNA barcodes, to identify tissue samples from plants, animals, or anything else with DNA. It's simpler than sequencing a whole genome: By looking at conserved gene regions that have mutated throughout evolutionary history, scientists can identify a species based on relatively few segments of DNA. One standard barcode region, for example, is a sequence of 648 base pairs within the gene for mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1, or CO1. Every animal contains a version of the gene for CO1, a critical part of the electron transport chain that helps drive the synthesis of ATP—the fuel that runs your cells.

But throughout history, small mutations—a nucleotide here, a nucleotide there—accumulate in the gene, and it’s those tiny tweaks that allow scientists to tell whether the genetic segment came from a bird or a fish or a fly. Other genetic regions are better for distinguishing species within groups of plants, bacteria, or fungi.

Over time, researchers have accumulated those barcodes in big, public databases hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information or the Consortium for the Barcode of Life. Those two collections have far more total sequences than Clear Labs, but many of them aren’t food-specific; they’re mostly there for researchers to pull apart animal and plant taxonomies (you don’t see much red-bellied woodpecker in the food supply).

That's why Clear Labs decided it needed to build its own database—repeatedly sequencing the same species that show up in food products until it had a consistent description of the genetic markers within. The company won't say exactly how many food genetic markers it has, but it's confident it has more than any of the main databases, and it will continue to expand now that Clear Labs has launched its first product, Clear View, in private beta.

Clear View was built for food retailers and manufacturers who want to keep a close eye on the safety and integrity of their products. By identifying the species of plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi in a sample, they can suss out the authenticity of an ingredient (whether the fish in those fish sticks is really what you think it is). They can also tell if a food is contaminated by microbes, contains an allergen, or has certain genetically modified ingredients. (The company isn't taking a stand on whether the ingredients are good or bad—just whether they're there or not).