Rapid seafood fraud detection powered by multiple technologies: Food authenticity using DNA-QR codes

Abstract

Crabs are extremely popular in global seafood market due to their flavour and nutritional content. However, these are frequently contaminated with inedible ones to meet expanding demand and go undetected, putting people's health at risk. In such scenario, genetic testing is the most persuasive approach to authenticate constituent species. Here we bought 11 crabs from a local market at Indian Sundarbans and created barcodes. We for the first time cross-validated our data with other approaches: Barcode-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism, Mini-barcoding and Barcode-Melt Curve Analyis along with subsequent data transformation into QR-code and draw a comparative assessment about the efficacy of each approach under various circumstances. We observed that 36% of the examined crabs are edible, whereas 64% are contaminated with inedible ones. We further demonstrated that Bar-RFLP is the most affordable efficient technique in addressing adulteration whereas Bar-MCA is more powerful than sequencing in recognizing very low levels of adulterant species from processed and preserved foods. Thus, we concluded that both Bar-RFLP and Bar-MCA along with the QR-code as data transformation and archival, are effective and rapid species identification tools that can be used instead of traditional sequencing-based approaches requiring extensive computational and data processing infrastructure, saving time and money.