DNA extraction from wool

Due to the fact that only a very small amount can be won from each animal, cashmere wool is an expensive resource for the textile industry which makes it susceptible to falsifications. Instead of cashmere, the cheaper sheep wool is used and the product is then declared as genuine cashmere. Or products only contain a small amount of cashmere while the rest is wool from other animals which is processed without declaration.

Therefore, the textile industry and testing laboratories need detection methods which guarantee reliable testing of cashmere products. The Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) has developed a method which allows for the
reliable detection of the falsification of such products. The basis of this method is a procedure which has been developed by the Institute to differentiate animal species and has been used successfully since 2002 for the analysis of foods and feeds.

"For this we extract the DNA from the wool”, explains Dr. Bjoern Seidel, the project manager at the Institute. A difficult task as hair only contains traces of DNA. Moreover, wool is partly treated with chemicals and heated for dyeing which in turn destroys a great part of the existing DNA material. “We have to multiply the DNA which we extract from the wool millionfold before we can analyze its origin, for example, goat, sheep or even camel”, Dr. Seidel describes the procedure. 

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