IPB Researchers Proved the Authenticity of Mackerel Fish Products
The demand for fishery products continues to increase as the population growth. Generally, a low supply and a high demand increases price, and in contrast, the greater the supply and the lower the demand, the lower the price tends to fall. The limited of raw materials and increased production costs affect trade fraud to increase unilateral benefits. Most mackerel belong to the family Scombridae, which also includes tuna and bonito. Generally mackerel are much smaller and slimmer than tuna, though in other respects they share many common characteristics. Their scales, if present at all, are extremely small. Like tuna and bonito, mackerel are voracious feeders, and are swift and manoeuvrable swimmers, able to streamline themselves by retracting their fins into grooves on their body. Mackerel is often used as a raw material in the manufacture of fishery products. While the demand for aquaculture products continues to increase, there is growing recognition of the need to address consumers' concerns for quality and safe products and animal health and welfare, the report said. Thus, issues such as food safety, traceability, certification and ecolabelling are assuming growing importance and considered as high priorities by many governments.
Processing causes these fish often become difficult to be recognized morphologically. Molecular approach through DNA amplification becomes the best method to identify the uthenticity of products that have undergone final differentiation, i.e., only size/shape.
Therefore, two researchers, Deden Yusman Maulid and Mala Nurilmala of the Department of Aquatic Product Technology of the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences of Bogor Agricultural University (FPIK IPB) implemented the research program on the DNA barcoding for the authentication of fish mackerel products.
The collected samples consisted of baso (sio), empek-empek (Plm), traditional crackers (KrsPa), and modern crackers (KrLM), they were obtained from traditional and modern markets around Bogor. The labels of collected samples explained that the products are made of mackerel fish. Primary designed is cytochrome b with a target of 380bp, as one of the gene encoding in mitochondrial DNA. An alignment analysis is used to determine the closeness of the species kinship.
The research revealed that the three products, namely baso (sio), crackers from the modern market (KrLM), and empek-empek (Plm), were made of raw mackerel, but crackers obtained from traditional markets (KrPsa) was not made of raw mackerel. (Wied)
