New techniques for identifying fish meat, including canned and processed fish, will even distinguish between different types of caviar
A team of scientists at Reading Scientific Services (RSSL) has successfully developed new techniques for identifying fish meat, including canned and processed fish.
It will even distinguish between different types of caviar.
A new service based on this pioneering work will open the way for the industry to provide much greater certainty on the quality and authenticity of its supplies.
RSSL's team has improved the reliability of research first published two years ago, which showed how the analysis of certain fish genes could be used to identify the species of fish.
That method covered a limited number of fresh fish varieties.
RSSL has increased the number of fresh fish on which the technique can be used, and perhaps more significantly, developed an entirely new approach that can be used on canned and processed fish.
Normally, the canning process degrades fish DNA to the point where it can't be analysed by the earlier method, so RSSL's work is a major break-through in this respect.
The RSSL technique works by making many copies of a gene (cytochrome B) found in the mitochondria of all fish cells.
Once the amount of this gene has been amplified sufficiently, it is chopped into fragments using a carefully selected range of DNA-cutting enzymes.
This produces a number of different fragments of DNA that can be measured, and the number and size of fragments will differ according to the species of fish present. Using the technique it will be possible to determine for example, whether a slab of filleted white fish is cod or coley, and whether a tinned fish is genuinely a sardine or some other species, or which fish species are present in a mixture (eg fish paste).
In some cases, it may even be possible to determine in which part of the world the fish were caught.
Commenting on the service, Dr Andrew Tingey stated, "The issue of authenticity is something which concerns all food producers because it has implications for accurate labelling and also quality.
RSSL already provides a meat speciation service using similar DNA techniques, and its application to fish was a challenging, but obvious extension of this expertise."
