GM feed test gets official recognition

The UK Accreditation Service, UKAS, has given its accreditation to the testing methods used by Reading Scientific Services Ltd (RSSL) for quantifying the amount of GM material in animal feeds. It's a timely boost for the animal feed industry after the recent introduction of mandatory requirements to label products that contain more that 0.9% of authorised GM varieties and 0.5% of unauthorised varieties.

The accreditation has been awarded for the methods used to quantify four GM varieties. These are the soya variety, Round-up Ready, and the maize Bt176, Bt11, and Mon810. This latest development means that RSSL now has the widest scope of accreditation of any lab in the UK.

It's been a good year for RSSL's GM testing laboratory. In July of this year RSSL announced that it had scored 100% accuracy in two consecutive rounds of the USDA/GIPSA quantitative proficiency testing and 100% accuracy in qualitative (presence/absence) detection in all of the rounds of USDA/GIPSA in which it participated. It also achieved equivalent success in five rounds of the FAPAS/GeMMA scheme, producing results well within the acceptance criteria imposed by the scheme's organisers.