Rapid Seafood Species Identification Using Chip-Based Capillary Electrophoresis and Protein Pattern Matching

Abstract

Authenticity is crucial to the seafood industry, as substitution and mislabeling have important economic, environmental, and food safety consequences. To address this problem, protein profiling and software algorithm techniques were developed to classify fish muscle samples by species. The method uses water-based protein extraction, chip-based microfluidic electrophoresis (Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer) for the analysis of high abundance fish muscle proteins, and a novel data analysis method for species-specific protein pattern recognition. The method's performance in distinguishing commercially important fish from commonly reported substitutions was evaluated using sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy determinations with all three performance measures at >98% for common substitutions. This study demonstrates that uncooked seafood products of commercially important species of catfish, snapper, and grouper can be rapidly distinguished from commonly substituted species with a high level of confidence. A tiered testing approach to seafood species verification by sequentially applying a rapid screening method and DNA testing is proposed to more effectively ensure accurate product labeling.

DNA metabarcoding for identification of species used in fish burgers

“…As widely reported by several authors (D'Amico et al, 2016;Walker et al, 2017;Marchetti et al, 2020;Piredda et al, 2022), the absence of morphological identification characters, together with the complexity of the fish supply chain, as well as the price differential between lookalike species, and the multiplicity of species and their corresponding values, make processed fishery products very vulnerable to food fraud and mislabelling (Pardo et al, 2016;FAO, 2020b. To date, food labelling is the most important instrument for safeguarding consumer safety and should prevent fraud and provide consumers with sufficient information to perform conscious food choices in terms of ethical and sustainable production (Varunjikar et al, 2022).…”