Commercial starches such as corn starch and potato starch are widely used as ingredients by industry and consumers. In China, the most common commercial types of starch are potato, sweet potato, cassava, corn, and wheat, but cassava starch is the cheapest of all the starches. Chinese researchers have developed a rapid and accurate quantitative detection method using droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) technology to identify cassava adulteration in commercial starch products.The ddPCR analysis showed that the weight of cassava (M) and cassava-extracted DNA content had a significant linear relationship—the correlation coefficient was R2 = 0.995. The developed method was tested by analysing 50 commercial starches (30 sweet potato, 12 potato, and 8 corn starch). Eleven of the 30 sweet potato starch samples were adulterated with cassava starch, and one sample has just over 37% cassava starch, also 5 out of the 12 potato starches were adulterated and 2 out of the 8 corn starches were adulterated.
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