[HN Gopher] Lactic Acid Bacteria as Markers for the Authenticati...
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Lactic Acid Bacteria as Markers for the Authentication of Swiss
Cheeses
Author : PetitPrince
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-05-02 08:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chimia.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chimia.ch)
| PetitPrince wrote:
| This is a paper describing how the Swiss dairy industry encodes a
| signature within the cheese itself.
|
| I find the parallel with digital signature interesting because it
| uses a similar scheme: the "public key" is the presence/absence
| of a set of strains of bacteria, and the "private key" is a
| (secret) set restriction enzyme used to identify the strain.
| version_five wrote:
| I just came across a company yesterday that is using engineered
| microbes (with a kind of bar code coded in them) as tracers for
| food. Personally it sounds a bit icky.
|
| https://www.aanikabio.com/
| thenayr wrote:
| [dead]
| inigoalonso wrote:
| Tom Scott mentioned this on his video from yesterday: How they
| saved the holes in Swiss cheese
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evV05QeSjAw
| h1fra wrote:
| Came to mention that! There is always a Tom Scott video for any
| topic :D
| ithinkso wrote:
| youtube version of xkcd?
| kleiba wrote:
| Some of my American peers here on HN may be as surprised as I was
| when I first found out that there's more than one - _the_ - Swiss
| Cheese. I mean, you know, the one with the holes!...
| zug_zug wrote:
| This is awesome. I'd love to see this at scale.
|
| I keep hearing about problems in food authenticity (e.g. fake
| olive-oil). I want the quality of my food to be auditable (is it
| really organic? Was it really grown in country X? Are these eggs
| really free-range?) and this seems like a step in that direction.
| jslaby wrote:
| They could use a similar inverse type process to check for
| authenticity of American cheese
| underlines wrote:
| To be honest, I don't know anybody in Europe who buys American
| cheese :D
| underlines wrote:
| lol. I did my Chemical Laboratory Assistant Apprenticeship at
| exactly this place and my uncle just retired as a Chemist 5
| months ago, working at Agroscope Liebefeld for over 30 years.
| perihelions wrote:
| Related HN thread, aged 11 months
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426700 ( _" Parmigiano
| Reggiano makers embedding tiny trackers in rind to fight cheese
| fraud"_, 300 comments)
| jl6 wrote:
| Sounds like they are banking on keeping the "proof-of-origin"
| culture under tight control, distributed only to authorized
| cheese manufacturers. This is similar to how AACS decryption keys
| are only distributed to authorized Blu-Ray equipment
| manufacturers.
| zyx321 wrote:
| It's a matter of effort. Counterfeit bluray are useless without
| the keys, counterfeit cheese is indistinguishable to the
| average consumer. You're not going to have the best and
| brightest biologists in the world competing for the glory of
| cracking Cheese DRM.
| DennisP wrote:
| Decryption keys generally aren't broken by the best and
| brightest cryptographers, they're leaked somehow. The same
| would apply here. If the real cheese sells for more than
| competitors, there's economic incentive.
| morkalork wrote:
| >Cheese DRM
|
| Makes it sound like we're living in a cyberpunk future
| written by Douglas Adams.
| zyx321 wrote:
| Life is a Cory Doctorow story...
| rchowe wrote:
| They also may not publish the DNA sequence they are using, or
| they may have more than one sequence and only publish one of
| them. Presumably it has to be in a highly conserved region of
| the bacterial genome (or present in a few highly conserved
| places).
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Funny coincidence, I was in Switzerland last week and indeed the
| cheese industry there is huge, and tasty.
|
| The thing though, I got to sample a Brie cheese made in
| Switzerland but I thought anything named Brie could only come
| from France?
|
| Nevertheless it was the most amazing cheese I had, much more
| bouncy and not runny or flaccid like President or Kolibrie brand.
| I asked the staff where I could buy it but they said it's a local
| product from Interlaken. :(
| ilyt wrote:
| > The thing though, I got to sample a Brie cheese made in
| Switzerland but I thought anything named Brie could only come
| from France?
|
| Switzerland is not in EU so if that is protected by some EU law
| I think it wouldn't apply ?
| detaro wrote:
| Coverage for these things goes farther thanks to various
| international treaties about mutual recognition of them, I
| believe Switzerland has joined at least some of them. Either
| way, "Brie" is not a protected label so it doesn't matter.
| detaro wrote:
| "Brie" is not a protected label. Some specific variants are
| protected ( _Brie de Meaux_ and _Brie de Melun_ from France,
| not sure if any non-French ones are)
| pdpi wrote:
| Could it have been a misunderstanding?
|
| Interlaken is, as the name implies, between two lakes, one of
| which called Brienz. Could have been "Brienz cheese" or
| something similar?
|
| There is a sbrinz cheese that's made nearby, but that seems to
| be more of a hard cheese that's used more like you would
| parmesan.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| The paper mentions isotopic analysis [1] for authenticity and
| origin, which fascinates me because of the breadth of
| applicability - even into criminal investigations of biological
| material to determine where you have been living.
|
| 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_analysis
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And to see if the "bio-identical" anabolic steroids (or other
| performance enhancing drugs) in your body were created in your
| (or someone's...) body, or in a lab.
|
| (Basically radio carbon dating, but against a subset of a
| molecule rather than the whole thing).
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