Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Restaurants plan DNA-certified premium seafood...

Restaurants around the world will soon use new DNA technology to assure patrons they are being served the genuine fish fillet or caviar they ordered, rather than inferior substitutes, an expert in genetic identification says.

In October, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved so-called DNA bar coding – a standardised fingerprint that can identify a species like a supermarket scanner reads a bar code – 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 bar coding as a fast, reliable and cost-effective tool for identifying organic matter.

(...)

Mislabelling is widespread in the seafood industry and usually involves cheaper types of fish being sold as more expensive varieties. A pair of New York high school students using DNA bar coding 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. Full story...

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