Bioinformatics Approach to Mitigate Mislabeling in EU Seafood Market and Protect Consumer Health

Abstract

Fisheries products are some of the most traded commodities world-wide and the potential for fraud is a serious concern. Fish fraud represents a threat to human health and poses serious concerns due to the consumption of toxins, highly allergenic species, contaminates or zoonotic parasites, which may be present in substituted fish. The substitution of more expensive fish by cheaper species, with similar morphological characteristics but different origins, reflects the need for greater transparency and traceability upon which which the security of the entire seafood value-chain depends. Even though EU regulations have made significant progress in consumer information by stringent labelling requirements, fraud is still widespread. Many molecular techniques such as DNA barcoding provide valuable support to enhance the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in the protection of consumer interests by unequivocally detecting any kind of fraud. This paper aims to highlight both the engagement of EU fishery policy and the opportunity offered by new biotechnology instruments to mitigate the growing fraud in the globalized fish market and to enforce the food security system to protect consumers’ health. In this paper, after a presentation of EU rules on fish labeling and a general overview on the current state of the global fish market, we discuss the public health implications and the opportunities offered by several techniques based on genetics, reporting a case study to show the efficacy of the DNA barcoding methodology in assessing fish traceability and identification, comparing different species of the Epinephelus genus, Mottled Grouper (Mycteroperca rubra) and Wreckfish (Polyprion americanus), often improperly sold with the commercial name of “grouper”.

An Authentication Survey on Retail Seafood Products Sold on the Bulgarian Market Underlines the Need for Upgrading the Traceability System

“…This evidence agrees with the data collected in Todorov [8], confirming the Bulgarian large retail fishery market trades are mainly oriented towards imports of prepared (frozen cleaned, filleted or sliced) and processed (canned, marinated) products of EU and non-EU origin. This is in agreement with the description also given by Vindigni and colleagues [48] on the type of products most imported at the EU level based on data provided by the EU Commission in 2020. It is also interesting to note the degree of preparation found not only in processed products (ready-to-eat or breaded precooked) but also in unprocessed products.…”

Molecular Barcoding: A Tool to Guarantee Correct Seafood Labelling and Quality and Preserve the Conservation of Endangered Species

“…In particular, per capita fish consumption grew significantly from 9.0 kg in 1961 to 20.5 kg in 2018, by about 1.5% per year [ 1 ]. Europeans consume, on average, 24.4 kg per person of fishery products annually, 4 kg more than the world average [ 4 ]. Despite persistent differences in levels of fish consumption between regions and states, significant trends and trajectories were observed [ 5 ].…”

“…Fish traceability is nowadays fundamental to avoid substitutions that may carry hidden risks for consumers; basic consequences may be health problems that occur primarily through the consumption of cryptic species coming from contaminated areas without any sanitary checks or able to trigger allergy problems [10,11]. It must be remarked that species substitution might even occur accidentally when taxa are difficult to recognize at a morphological level, and consequently the systematics of closely related species are trivial [4]. The rise of international fish trade leads to the need to improve the traceability of fishery products.…”

Digital transformation of peatland eco-innovations (‘Paludiculture’): Enabling a paradigm shift towards the real-time sustainable production of ‘green-friendly’ products and services

“…Lessons learnt from sustainable practices in adjacent agriculture infers that sustainability across the peatlands will be centred on delivering flexibility in tandem with efficiency where future digital transformative activities will help unlock complex economic and societal challenges (Rowan and Pogue, 2021). However, the complexity and diversity of such data is likely to be vast and will require systematic approaches to make digitalization sustainable, including life cycle assessments (LCA) (Ruiz-Salmón et al, 2020;Ruiz-Salmon et al, 2021;Laso et al, 2022), material flow analysis (MFA, Abualtaher and Bar, 2019), principle component analysis (Naughton et al, 2020), bioinformatics to mitigate mislabelling in worldwide seafood market and to protect consumer health (Vindigni et al, 2021) and so forth. Cooney and co-workers (2021) investigated impact categories that can also be applied to evaluate emerging peatland aquaculture systems, namely using LCA and included global warming potential (GWP), acidification potential (AP), eutrophication potential (EP), freshwater and marine ecotoxicity potential (EAETP and MAEPT), cumulative energy demand (CED), net primary production use (NPPU) and water use.…”