Abstract
The demand for fish and seafood is growing worldwide. Meanwhile, problems related to the integrity and safety of the fishery sector are increasing, leading legislators, producers, and consumers to search for ways to effectively protect themselves from fraud and health hazards related to fish consumption. What is urgently required now is the availability of reliable, truthful, and reproducible methods assuring the correspondence between the real nature of the product and label declarations accompanying the same product during its market life. The evaluation of the inorganic composition of fish and seafood appears to be one of the most promising strategies to be exploited in the near future to assist routine and official monitoring operations along the supply chain. The present review article focuses on exploring the latest scientific achievements of using the multi-elemental composition of fish and seafood as an imprint of their authenticity and traceability, especially with regards to the geographical origin. The scientific literature of the last 10 years focusing on the analytical determination and statistical elaboration of elemental data (alone or in combination with methodologies targeting other compounds) to verify the identity of fishery products is summarized and discussed.
Highlights
The verification of food authenticity and integrity is a complex topic which has become a matter of public interest in recent years
The application of element profiling approaches to fish and seafood products has been gaining momentum, and the scientific community has been working on the optimization of both existing instrumentations for multi-elemental analysis and algorithms for statistical analysis
The greater thrust has come from advances in chemometrics and machine learning techniques, which provide great support to the identification of maximum relevant chemical information from large datasets not otherwise accessible
Summary
The verification of food authenticity and integrity is a complex topic which has become a matter of public interest in recent years. Many different biological and chemical methods have been developed over the years to ascertain the authentic nature of a wide range of foodstuffs These methods focus on the evaluation of the organic (DNA, proteins, lipids, sugars, and/or metabolites) and inorganic (elements, isotope ratios) fractions of food and exploit the principles of chromatography, mass spectrometry, and spectroscopy to identify, in a targeted way, few or multiple compounds acting as secondary markers of authenticity [4]. Foods 2021, 10, 270 in tracing and authenticating transformed (e.g., salted, smoked, marinated) fish and seafood products have been achieved
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