Fera

The government agency, which aims to support and develop a sustainable food chain and a healthy natural environment, has helped develop tests to screen meat for veterinary drugs and to monitor pesticide residues in fruit.

It is also involved in developing scientific techniques to check that a product corresponds to the information on the label, and the agency was called upon to help when no reliable test was available to determine the species origin (pig or cow) of gelatines, which are added to a wide range of foods, confectioneries and drugs to thicken them and improve their texture.

Many consumers, including vegetarians and those with certain religious preferences, seek to avoid gelatine made from the bones of these animals.

Meanwhile the University of York invested in state-of-the-art instrumentation to analyse proteins and Fera established a collaboration with the Department of Biology. But during 2006, Fera's scientists were introduced to some of the University's archaeologists, who shared team's interest in skin and bone proteins, but from the point of view of analysing buried bodies.

Helen Grundy, protein biochemist at Fera, said: "From our conversations with the archaeologists, it turned out that proteins present in skin and bone, which have been buried in the ground for thousands of years, undergo identical changes to the proteins during gelatine manufacture. The University's archaeology team, BioArCh, had begun to build a massive database to differentiate the proteins found in all sorts of species, including mammoth and Tyrannosaurus Rex. The archaeologists suggested that the team from Fera could add their data from pig and cow proteins to this database and create a method for identifying the species origin of foods. This would also help the archaeologists' work by broadening and improving their database in a win/win situation."

Fera is now entering Best Business and Higher Education link in The Press Business Awards 2012.