Patent ID: 8420400

Claim:
The method for authenticating a tablet comprising the steps of: providing an optical reporter marker, the optical reporter marker having at least one light emitting upconverting phosphor particle linked by a linking group comprising an alkylene moiety, to a nucleic acid material, the nucleic acid material having a plurality of polymorphic double stranded (ds) DNA fragments, said polymorphic dsDNA fragments each having an artificial sequence obtained by digestion and ligation of extracted DNA, applying the optical reporter marker to the tablet of interest, detecting the optical reporter marker associated with the tablet with a light source, obtaining a sample of the optical reporter marker from the tablet of interest for analysis, analyzing the collected sample to detect the presence of the identifiable portion of the polymorphic (ds)DNA fragments linked to the upconverting phosphor particle by performing a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) on the collected sample comprising said non-heritable polymorphic (ds)DNA fragments using specific primers, thereby producing specific length amplicons; and verifying that the tablet is genuine by detecting the specific length amplicons amplified from said polymorphic dsDNA fragments in said tablet.