Fish certified reference material to combat food fraud

The JRC produced two dried fish powders CRMs, EURM?-021 and EURM?-022, for the species Pollachius pollachius (pollack) and Pollachius virens (saithe), to help combatting food fraud. These CRMs allow verifying correct labelling of fresh fish and fish products, following Regulation (EU) No 1379/2013.

Food fraud, like mislabelling and substitution of fish and fish products, has repeatedly been observed for commercially important fish species. EU Legislation requires transparent production, processing and marketing of fishery or aquaculture products. Consequently, national authorities regularly perform inspections and carry out controls to ensure correct implementation of the related labelling legislation (EU) No 1379/2013.?

Whole fish can be identified based on morphological characteristics. This is, however, not possible for fish fillet or other processed food products. Here, for instance specific DNA-barcodes, short ranges of unique regions of mitochondrial DNA, are used for species identification.?

To support control authorities, the JRC produced two dried fish powder CRMs allowing to compare their DNA sequences with the ones found in food products.

EURM-021 and EURM-022 contain powder processed from one fillet of one single fish each. Fillet pieces were dried using a freeze-drying process and cryogenically milled to obtain a fine powder. The fish powder in EURM-021 was certified to originate from Pollachius pollachius (pollack) and in EURM-022 from Pollachius virens (saithe). Bi-directional Sanger sequencing confirmed that the two specific DNA-barcodes in the mitochondrial DNA (cytochrome b gene (cytb) and the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene (COI)) are specific for the two fish species.

The two CRMs are traceable to the respective deposited sequences in the databases GenBank? (NCBI), FishTrace (EC) and Bar Code of Life Database System (BOLD).