ANSTO’s gathers momentum with progress on the development of handheld technology for off-site assessments of the origin of tiger prawns and an expansion of the work to other seafood species.
The seafood provenance team, in collaboration with universities, industry, and government, has developed an innovative approach to determine the geographic origin of seafood using environmental fingerprints with more than 85 per cent accuracy.
The fingerprint of a fish, crustacean, or bivalve is formed by the unique combination of elements absorbed from the local environment.
The fingerprint can be generated using three analytical techniques, , , and , to identify and measure the quantity of elements in the sample and interpret the data with a mathematical model developed at ANSTO.
The lab-based approach was validated at ANSTO on a variety of seafood samples with the support of the , , Sydney Fish Market, and the and subsequently expanded to the development of portable technology with the funding support from the
ANSTO organised an online workshop late last year to showcase progress on the development of the portable scanning technology and the creation of fingerprint databases and discussions on the path forward to maintain and expand the project.
More than fifty-two participants from a range of seafood industry, governmental, and universities attended the workshop virtually.
“We were able to confirm for our partners the viability of the approach, which has an accuracy of more than 85 percent, which is similar to our lab-based approach,” said Mazumder.
The provenance team tested and adapted a portable X-ray fluorescence scanner, supplied by .
The device has so far been calibrated using tiger prawns, with oysters and finfish species the next stage in development to build up the fingerprint databases and work out how to make a commercially viable technology available,” said Mazumder.
The also supports work on oysters, drawing on its network of oyster farmers.
Because of public, industry, and government interest in seafood provenance research, Dr Mazumder was interviewed by the ABC late last year about the research.
Listen to the interview below.
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Play
The ABC also published theonline.
