Team:UC Davis/Olive Mills

According to David Garci-Aguirre, Manager of Production and Master Miller, Corto Olive Co., the quality control division of the olive oil industry is also growing in leaps and bounds, sparking new research projects within the field, and inviting the development of new quality assurance instruments to facilitate industrial scale-up. During a June 2014 site tour of the Corto Olive Co. production facility, Mr. Garci-Aguirre informed the iGEM team of his interest in supplementing traditional and laborious methods of quality assurance, most notably gas chromatography, with more easily utilized and economical instruments. Other operations managers have corroborated this statement, offering future collaboration for real-time testing of the prototype at their respective facilities. Common to these managers, was a belief that a rapid, cheap, and accurate biosensor for the detection of rancid compounds would be a useful addition to the olive oil industry. Thus, on the producer level, our enzymatic biosensor could be integrated into the division of quality control, allowing millers to more easily, cheaply, and thoroughly inspect the chemical profile of their products, and most importantly, make critical assessments as to whether their stock meets the stipulations of industry standards. This understanding of quality control is supported by a set of criteria delineated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for quality control apparatuses. According to the FAO, quality control can be defined as “maintenance of quality at a level that satisfies the customer and that is economical to the producer or seller” (Quality control in the fish industry, FAO Corporate Document).