Spatial fingerprinting: horizontal fusion of multi-dimensional bio-tracers as solution to global food provenance problems

Abstract

Building the capacity of efficiently determining the provenance of food products represents a crucial step towards the sustainability of the global food system. Whether it is for enforcing existing egislation or providing reliable information to consumers, technologies to verify geographical origin of food are being actively developed. Biological tracers (bio-tracers) such as DNA and stable isotopes have recently demonstrated their potential for determining provenance. Here we show that the data fusion of bio-tracers is a very powerful technique for geographical provenance discrimination. Based on 90 individuals of Sockeye salmon that originate from 3 different areas for which we measured 17 bio-tracers, we demonstrate that increasing the combined bio-tracers results in stronger the discriminatory power. The generality of our results are mathematically demonstrated under simplifying assumptions and numerically confirmed in our case study using three commonly used supervised learning techniques.

The universal imprint of oxygen isotopes can track the origins of seafood

“…Chemical markers could be used in conjunction with taxon-specific provenance methods, such as DNA analysis or fatty acid profiling. While the additional time and financial costs need to balanced against the potential benefit, using multiple methods and biomarkers can strengthen the accuracy and precision of provenance assignments (Cazelles et al, 2021), For example, a recent meta-analysis of provenance testing using DNA and isotopic markers, found that a combined DNA-isotope approach reduced the chance of misassignment (Cusa et al, 2021). The study thus concluded that using both DNA and isotopes would be most effective where the regions of interest include isotopically similar water bodies (i.e., between Temperate Asia and Australasia in this study) or where populations are genetically similar.…”