June 18, 2007

Test kit developed for easy melamine detection

Applied Biosystems and MDS Sciex has developed a new food contaminant testing method which can easily detect melamine and cyanuric acid to get accurate results for meats.

The companies said the testing kit which they claim will help laboratories and food manufacturers improve safety as it reduces time to test contaminants as well as avoiding delays in shipments waiting on results and improve recall effectiveness if products have already left the plant.

The method is based on liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS). It reduces testing time to less than six minutes from the 30 minutes required by current systems, the companies said. They also stated the new method is the first commercially available method to test for both contaminants simultaneously with this advanced technology.