Quote:
Originally Posted by yorkietalkjilly  Thanks, Phil, for your insight and for looking into the other study. Can I ask you to explain the difference in quantitative vs. qualitative in this context?
I've heard about DNA degradation in food processing and during storage, exposure, testing procedures, etc., and here's a silly question but wouldn't the scientists or testers performing the study in question take DNA degradation into consideration before positing on their conclusions lest they be considered, well, sloppy, in drawing those conclusions? |
The results are qualitative rather than quantitative because they posted the amount of the different DNA's detected as a
percentage of the total DNA detected. It would have been quantitative (and more accurate) if they had posted the
number of micrograms of DNA (
an actual amount of DNA) that they detected in the samples. The best way to do this study would have been to do control tests on freshly processed samples of raw meat, and then tested cooked samples to see if there was any degradation during food processing, and then compared the two results. I'm not saying that the results of this study were invalid, I'm just saying that they didn't do the proper controls, and they didn't cite any papers that HAVE done the proper controls. But the paper still has some good data where they detected DNA that wasn't supposed to be in the different foods. We just can't be certain of the amounts, and whether they are significant for animals with allergies.