Using DNA to Protect Your Mark

With international counterfeiting costing US companies $200 billion to $250 billion a year, there is an extremely large market for protective technology. A small L.A. startup has developed possibly the best solution yet, using the most basic of materials. The startup, called Applied DNA Sciences, takes strands of DNA from plants and alters them to create unique chemical compounds that will identify a product. The compound acts somewhat like a chemical barcode that will identify whether a product is an authentic or a fraud. For example, a producer of an expensive Japanese sake has been inserting marking DNA into his wine. The consumer can test the bottle’s authenticity with a detection kit sold with the sake.

Just last week, Applied DNA signed a ‘strategic agreement’ with Holomex of Mexico, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of security holograms. The DNA and hologram technology can be inserted into DVDs during production to mark the genuineness of the DVD.