Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

The Barcode Blog

A mostly scientific blog about short DNA sequences for species identification and discovery. I encourage your commentary. -- Mark Stoeckle

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Poisonous fish revealed

What fish is that you are eating? This question has many possible answers. Unlike meats, which are derived from a handful of species, most of which are farmed, there are numerous fish sold for human consumption, most of which are wild. The US FDA Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency lists of approved fish and shellfish include approximately 1700 and  660 names, respectively. And yet DNA surveys regularly turn up fish in the marketplace that are not on any regulatory list, as well as mislabeling of those that are listed, suggesting we may not know what we are eating or what fish stocks are being harvested.

fish-soupIn addition to economic and environment impact, mislabeling can have public health implications. In April 2009 J Food Protection government and research scientists report on 2 cases of tetrodotoxin poisoning in Chicago, IL resulting from ingestion of soup prepared from mislabeled puffer fish, sold as “monkfish.”  Two additional cases were traced to the same supplier and this led to the recall of several thousand pounds of frozen fish. Morphologic examination of leftover parts and DNA testing of the cooked meat implicated Lagocephalus sp., most likely Green roughed-back puffer  L. lunaris. Unlike most other toxic puffer species, L. lunaris tetrodotoxin is in muscle as well as organ tissue, making safe preparation impossible. At the time of the study, there were no reference sequences in BOLD for L. lunaris, so the DNA barcode identification was incomplete. It would be of interest to repeat the database searches (as of today GenBank contains 1 L. lunaris COI sequence and BOLD taxonomy browser lists 2), but for some reason the sequences obtained by the researchers were not published.

DNA testing is the only way to identify many of the fish items in the marketplace. I expect that standardized DNA testing (aka DNA barcoding) will play an increasingly important role in helping protect both consumers and fish.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Poisonous fish revealed”

  1. Jesse Says:
    August 16th, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    Wow, this is very interesting to know. I hope that DNA barcoding can continue to help us regulate fish and other meats that may not be healthy for us. That is shady business labeling fish as something else, hope everyone was ok that ate it in the incident you mentioned!

Contact: mark.stoeckle@rockefeller.edu

About this site

This web site is an outgrowth of the Taxonomy, DNA, and Barcode of Life meeting held at Banbury Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, September 9-12, 2003. It is designed and managed by Mark Stoeckle, Perrin Meyer, and Jason Yung at the Program for the Human Environment (PHE) at The Rockefeller University.

About the Program for the Human Environment

The involvement of the Program for the Human Environment in DNA barcoding dates to Jesse Ausubel's attendance in February 2002 at a conference in Nova Scotia organized by the Canadian Center for Marine Biodiversity. At the conference, Paul Hebert presented for the first time his concept of large-scale DNA barcoding for species identification. Impressed by the potential for this technology to address difficult challenges in the Census of Marine Life, Jesse agreed with Paul on encouraging a conference to explore the contribution taxonomy and DNA could make to the Census as well as other large-scale terrestrial efforts. In his capacity as a Program Director of the Sloan Foundation, Jesse turned to the Banbury Conference Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, whose leader Jan Witkowski prepared a strong proposal to explore both the scientific reliability of barcoding and the processes that might bring it to broad application. Concurrently, PHE researcher Mark Stoeckle began to work with the Hebert lab on analytic studies of barcoding in birds. Our involvement in barcoding now takes 3 forms: assisting the organizational development of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life and the Barcode of Life Initiative; contributing to the scientific development of the field, especially by studies in birds, and contributing to public understanding of the science and technology of barcoding and its applications through improved visualization techniques and preparation of brochures and other broadly accessible means, including this website. While the Sloan Foundation continues to support CBOL through a grant to the Smithsonian Institution, it does not provide financial support for barcoding research itself or support to the PHE for its research in this field.