Restaurants to test fish DNA, Restaurants set to reel in fish mislabelling with DNA technology.
The mislabelling of fish is all too common with one study finding that a quarter of fish tested weren't the type advertised.
However, DNA technology is being introduced around the world to assure patrons they are being served the genuine fish fillet or caviar they ordered, rather than inferior substitutes.
In October, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved so-called DNA barcoding — a standardised fingerprint that can identify a species like a supermarket scanner reads a barcode — to prevent the mislabelling of both locally produced and imported seafood in the United States.
Other national regulators around the world are also considering adopting DNA barcoding as a fast, reliable and cost-effective tool for identifying organic matter.
Mislabelling in the seafood industry usually involves cheaper types of fish being sold as more expensive varieties.
A pair of New York high school students using DNA barcoding of food stocked in their own kitchens found in a 2009 study that caviar labelled as sturgeon was actually Mississippi paddlefish.
In a published study a year earlier, another pair of students from the high school found that one-fourth of fish samples they had collected around New York were incorrectly labelled as higher-priced fish.
Mislabelling of fish — which account for almost half the world's vertebrate species — also poses risks to human health and the environment.
In 2007, several people became seriously ill from eating illegally imported toxic pufferfish from China that had been mislabelled as monkfish to circumvent U.S. import restrictions.
Endangered species are also sold as more common fish varieties.
David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Washington-based Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said he has started discussions with the restaurant industry and seafood suppliers about utilising DNA technology as a means of certifying the authenticity of delicacies.
‘When they sell something that's really expensive, they want the consumer to believe that they're getting what they're paying for,’ Schindel told The Associated Press.
‘We're going to start seeing a self-regulating movement by the high-end trade embracing barcoding as a mark of quality,’ he said.
While it would never be economically viable to DNA test every fish, it would be possible to test a sample of several fish from a trawler load, he said.
A spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency in the UK told MailOnline: 'We acknowledge the issue about fish mislabelling and we work closely with Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) in ensuring that this type of technology is available to trading standards officers.'
Schindel is organiser of the biennial International Barcode of Life Conference, which is being held today in the southern Australian city of Adelaide.
The fourth in the conference series brings together 450 experts in the field to discuss new and increasingly diverse applications for the science.
Applications range from discovering what Australia's herd of 1 million feral camels feeds on in the Outback to uncovering fraud in Malaysia's herbal drug industry. restaurants fish DNA, restaurants fish DNA inferior substitutes being served, Barcode of Life,
Schindel leads a consortium of scientists from almost 50 nations in overseeing the compilation of a global reference library for the Earth's 1.8 million known species.
The Barcode of Life Database so far includes more than 167,000 species.
Source:dailymail
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