Identification criteria for tea-based beverages

One of the priority areas of scientific research in the field of quality control of food products is to develop reliable criteria to identify their raw materials composition. The purpose of the work is to test the previously proposed integrated approach for the identification of tea raw materials in soft drinks, as well as the identification of other types of plant raw materials (willow tea and lemon). First screening the test samples for caffeine content and then for L-theanine content allows us to identify possible counterfeits containing, for example, fireweed extract instead of green tea extract, and to select samples for further molecular genetic studies including sampling and extraction of DNA from the objects of the study, amplification, endonucleic splitting of amplikons, electrophoresnic detection of PCR products and RFLP-fragments in agarose gel. At the same time, PCR products amplified from DNA samples from tea extract, fireweed and lemon pulp were split by TAQI, BTRI and HinfI restrictions into characteristic fragments. It is shown that the TAQI, BTRI and HinfI restricted PCR-RFLP used by the PCR-RFLP allows you to identify not only tea raw materials as part of non-alcoholic beverages, but also fireweed and additional components, for example, lemon, with its joint presence with tea. In general, the proposed integrated approach, including chromatographic (determination of caffeine and L-theanine) and molecular genetic methods (determining marker fragments of tea DNA), can increase the efficiency of detecting falsified non-alcoholic drinks in which tea raw materials are replaced by other plant raw materials.