Detection of fraudulence in fish marketing using dna barcoding as a molecular technique

Abstract

Fraudulence in fish market has emerged as a global problem. According to, The Consumer Rights Protection Act 2009 consumers are more and more demanding about composition and provenance of processed, unprocessed of edible food products. Recently, DNA barcoding has achieved support as a rapid, cost-effective and broadly applicable molecular diagnostic technique for this purpose. However, the maturity of the barcode database as a tool for any kind of food authentication has yet to be authenticated using real market samples. The present case study was undertaken for this reason. This study was to conduct a vigorous, repeatable species substantiation protocol that could be used to benchmark the current and future incidences of mislabeling in Bangladesh fish market. In this study, we used a DNA barcoding approach to identify species substitutions cases in different fish species sold in Super shop and local fish market in Bangladesh. We amplified the cytochrome oxidase c subunit 1(COI) barcode sequence (656 bp long) for all the analyzed specimens, and we compared them with reference sequences from different databases (GenBank and BOLD). Though the database is undergoing continual development, it was able to provide species matches of >81.81% sequence similarity for 10 samples tested. The overall fraudulence was 60% but for specific fraudulence for whole fish is 71.42% and fraudulence for fillet fish was 33.33%. These results demonstrate that DNA barcoding is a reliable tool for detecting fish products adulteration in Bangladesh. We recommend its use for control and law enforcement to get rid of from fish market fraudulence.