Something's Fishy: Using Technology to Combat Fish Fraud
Photo of fishing vessel by Egle Sidaraviciute on Unsplash
Mislabeling fish is endemic in the global fish trade, with numerous estimates putting the number at 30% of all seafood. While there are numerous efforts to identify and thwart such behavior, many are inefficient and time-consuming.
While the Food and Drug Administration follows a paper trail to establish a chain of custody on imported fish, it does little actual DNA species-identification testing unless it has a good reason to suspect fraud. And when testing is done, samples are usually shipped to a centralized lab location that can take days to return results, which is not all that useful if you are trying to move a large volume of fish into the market.
Marine Microverse Institute in Kittery Point, Maine is developing (with the University of New Hampshire and Maine Technology Institute) a fish-DNA, species-authentication test using whole-genome diagnostic tools for fish retailers.
Chart courtesy of Oceana Report “Casting a Wider Net: More Action Needed to Stop Seafood Fraud in the United States”
“With the increase in mislabeling and fraud, we want to empower retailers with a more rapid and accurate DNA-testing platform used on-site to identify commonly mislabeled species,” says executive director John Bucci, a biological oceanographer with a specialization in molecular ecology. “We want to help the seafood industry distinguish between cod and pollock, or Pacific cod and Atlantic cod, or bluefin and yellowfin tuna, or wild Chinook and farmed salmon.”
“We want to help the seafood industry distinguish between cod and pollock, or Pacific cod and Atlantic cod, or bluefin and yellowfin tuna, or wild Chinook and farmed salmon.”
Marine Microverse Institute has a provisional patent on its core technology—a prepackaged assay kit designed with customized genes that differentiates between closely related fish species on a variety of test platforms. “The marker genes within the assay are designed using bioinformatics from whole-genome sequencing, which produce species-specific assays and are an improvement compared to traditional DNA tests,” says Bucci. “Before this innovation, the industry relied on assays with limited capacity for species specificity.”
“Seafood importers that handle thousands of pounds of fish would like to verify fish themselves rather than rely on the supplier for identification,” says Bucci. “These customers can extract DNA from muscle or fin tissue from frozen blocks of fish with a benchtop or handheld device that can deliver results to a smartphone.”