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AssigneesSafeTraces, Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC
InventorsAntonios Zografos, George Roy Farquar
Estimating the term…
Food distributed to consumers through a distribution chain may be traced by tagging the food with DNA tags that identify the origin of the food, such as the grower, packer and other points of distribution, and their attributes. This makes it much quicker and easier to trace the food in case of food contamination or adulteration. Preferably these attributes indicate the field, location, crew and machine used to grow and process the food, and the dates of the various steps of food harvesting, processing and distribution. Natural or synthetic DNA pieces may be used to tag items, including food items. Multidigit binary or other types of bar codes may be represented by multiple types of DNA. Each digit of the bar code may be represented by one, two or more unique DNA pieces.
A method of applying a taggant to a material to identify an attribute of the material, comprising:
A method of tagging a material with a taggant comprising a DNA barcode, the DNA bar code comprising at least N unique independent pieces of DNA constructed to be distinguishable from the material, each unique independent piece of DNA corresponding to a binary digit of N binary digits of a DNA bar code that identifies the attribute of the material, N being a positive integer greater than one, the method comprising:
A taggant applied to a material, the taggant comprising at least one DNA bar code for identifying an origin of the material, wherein the at least one DNA bar code includes at least N unique independent pieces of DNA, representing N digits of a bar code that identifies an attribute of the material, wherein each of the at least N unique independent pieces of DNA represents one value of a corresponding one of the N digits, N being a positive integer greater than one, and wherein each of the at least N unique independent pieces of DNA are constructed to be distinguishable from DNA present in the material.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.