Recent Advances in Closed-Tube Barcoding for FastFish-ID

FastFish-ID for rapid and accurate identification of fish species was conceived at Brandeis University based on pioneering work on Closed-Tube Barcoding (Rice et al., Mitochondrial DNA Part A 27(2):1358-1363, 2016; Sirianni et al., Genome 59:1049-1061, 2016). FastFish-ID was subsequently validated and commercialized at Thermagenix, Inc. using a portable device and high-precision PCR (Naaum et al., Food Res Int 141:110035, 2021). The motivation for these efforts was the pressing need for a technology that could be widely used throughout the seafood supply chain to combat IUU Fishing (Helyar et al., PLOS ONE 9, 2014) and overfishing (FAO, State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018. http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/I9540EN/ , 2018), along with seafood fraud and mislabeling (Watson et al., Fish Fish 17:585-595, 2015). These destructive practices are wasting fish stocks, frustrating attempts to achieve seafood sustainability, endangering oceanic ecosystems, and causing consumers billions of dollars each year (Porterfield et al., Oceana: February, 2022). During the past three Covid19 pandemic years, EcologeniX, LLC has taken over further development and optimization of FastFish-ID. The present chapter provides an overview of the improvements introduced throughout the FastFish-ID process.