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Maurizio Casiraghi

Supermarket DNA: food
and the barcode of life

Using DNA barcoding we were able to identify cases of seafood substitutions in the marketplace. In these cases low value species or species that present a potential food safety hazard are mislabeled and substituted in whole or in part for a more expensive, or for a species with no potential food safety hazard.
Nowadays consumers pay more and more attention to food quality and safety topics. But when they buy biological products in slices, or in deeply manipulated forms, they are obliged to trust the seller on the identity of what they are buying.
In recent times, the reduction of the costs of molecular analyses and the availability of laboratories performing these analyses even for private citizen are giving consumers new tools to increase their knowledge on food products.
Indeed, in 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration included DNA barcoding as a standard analysis for seafood species detection.
The idea behind DNA barcoding is quite simple: a marketplace product might be easily identifiable by its item barcode. In a biological product the DNA, present in each single cell, can be read and interpreted as a barcode, allowing a reliable, quick and unique identification. One or more particular parts of the whole DNA are selected as a molecular barcode, allowing the discrimination among different organisms.
The DNA barcoding is currently an ambitious project, coordinated by an international consortium, aiming at the molecular identification of all the living beings.
Our lab is a node of this international network.

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Maurizio Casiraghi

ZooPlantLab
Dip. di Biotecnologie e Bioscienze
Università di Milano Bicocca
Piazza della Scienza 2 - 20126 Milano - Italy
Tel +39 02 64483413
email: maurizio.casiraghi@unimib.it
Website: www.zooplantlab.btbs.unimib.it

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