Is it not only fair to get what you paid for? An estimated 30 percent of seafood is being wrongfully labeled, cheating fishermen, the seafood industry and consumers in the United States for up to $25 billion every year.
Researchers from the University of South Florida aim to put a stop to this by creating a handy sensor, preventing other fish from being passed off as grouper.
In a paper published in the journal Food Control, researchers detailed the technology behind the sensor. Called QuadPyre RT-NASBA, the sensor quickly answers the question "Is it grouper?" on site, be it in restaurants or warehouses or even on a fishing boat, to easily inform the user about the authenticity of the fish being tested.
Samples are tested with real-time nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (RT-NASBA), purifying and identifying RNA to determine if the fish is grouper or not.
It can be difficult to identify grouper with just a visual inspection as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has 64 species allowed under the label. Unscrupulous individuals take advantage of this to meet their personal business quotas without circumventing commercial quotas imposed on groupers.
"The demand for grouper in the U.S. is so strong that it cannot be met by the harvesting of domestic species alone," explained Robert Ulrich, the lead author for the paper, adding that more than 4,000 metric tons of grouper from foreign sources were imported in 2012, which amounted to $33.5 million.
With this much grouper being imported, there's a big opportunity for fraud, making consumers pay more when they're getting seafood of less value and allowing importers to skip out on paying tariffs by misdeclaring shipments.
The researchers are of the belief that the QuadPyre RT-NASBA is accurate enough to tell if a grouper has been substituted even in cooked fish. Even with samples soaking in sauces or covered in breading, the sensor should still be able to detect if they are grouper or not, a dramatic improvement from other identification techniques.
Where other procedures can take hours or even days to accurately identify a sample, the QuadPyre RT-NASBA only requires no more than 45 minutes to ascertain if the fish is grouper or not.
Use of the sensor will complement the seafood safety bill introduced recently in Congress as well as other bills that protect the welfare of the consumer.
Aside from Ulrich, John Paul, David John, David Fries, Geran Barton and Gary Hendrick also contributed to the paper.
