Saving Seafood

Faster seafood DNA testing on the way

November 30, 2016 — A new, faster seafood DNA testing technology could be developed by late next year, thanks to research starting soon in the United States.

J. Aquiles Sanchez, a senior research scientist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S.A., will test and develop a “fast, cost-effective identification of edible fish and fish products to prevent species substitution and fraud,” according to the Seafood Industry Research Fund (SIRF), which is funding the project.

The research seeks to develop a rapid means of seafood species identification using Closed-Tube DNA Bar Coding. Compared to difficult and expensive DNA testing that the Food and Drug Administration uses currently, the closed-DNA system “represents a convenient alternative that can be used with both laboratory equipment and, importantly, handheld devices,” SIRF said in a statement.

“It is being developed for commercial use throughout the seafood supply chain. We know it will be less than the cost of laboratory DNA testing and results are much quicker than sending to a lab and waiting for those results. Speed is critical to the potential to use this technology to prevent mislabeling of fish species,” Russ Mentzer, chairman of SIRF, told SeafoodSource.

However, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.-based InstantLabs already offers rapid DNA tests for several seafood species, including Atlantic, sockeye and coho salmon, Atlantic blue crab and catfish.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

GMO fish and the strangeness of American salmon

December 2, 2015 — Sometime in the next few years, an entirely new fish will appear on American plates. After several decades of biotech research and a final upstream push past the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month, the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, a genetically engineered species of fish, will go into commercial production. While modified plants like corn and soy abound in the American diet, this will mark the first time in history that an engineered animal has been approved for human consumption. The new fish’s genetic code is comprised of components from three fish: base DNA from an Atlantic salmon; a growth gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon; and a promoter, a kind of “on” switch for genes, from a knobby-headed eel-shaped creature called an ocean pout.

The salmon’s pathway to the market will involve a similarly complex formulation. The first phase of AquAdvantage production will take place in Canada, on Prince Edward Island. There, the all-female eggs will be rendered sterile through a pressure treatment. They will then be flown to Panama, where they’ll be hatched, raised to harvestable size, slaughtered, and imported into the U.S. as the familiar orange-hued fillets that Americans have come to prefer above all other types of fish. Though AquaBounty hopes that the costs of this circuitous route to market could be offset by the savings incurred from the fish’s rapid growth (the company claims that AquAdvantage reaches maturity in about half the time as unmodified fish), the company is hoping to eventually gain permission to farm the fish here at home. “In the longer run,” AquaBounty’s co-founder, Elliot Entis, wrote me in an e-mail, “the real payoff will be when inland recirculating facilities are built in the U.S.”

Read the full story at The New Yorker