Fatty acid profiles as natural tracers of provenance and lipid quality indicators in illegally sourced fish and bivalves

Abstract

Determining where harvested or produced seafood comes from is a pressing issue worldwide, with growing consumers’ demand for traceable and sustainable seafood products. Identifying fine-scale traceability markers is particularly important in the context of small-scale fisheries, which are prone to illegal harvesting and mislabelling and associated food safety risks. Here we explored the power of fatty acid profiling as a fine-scale tracer of the geographical origin (<30 km apart) of the Peppery furrow shell bivalve (Scrobicularia plana) and the European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) collected in three locations within a large, urbanized estuary. Fatty acid profiling provided a high classification accuracy of both species to their collection sites (80%–100% for the seabass and the bivalve respectively). Fatty acid profiling also allowed the determination of food lipid quality indices. The EPA + DHA values and the atherogenic (Ai), thrombogenic (Ti) and the hypocholesterolemic/hypercholesterolemic (h/H) indexes were all within ranges of high lipid-quality seafood, albeit they varied significantly among collection sites (except h/H). Overall, results highlight the strength of fatty acid profiling as a natural marker to trace the geographic origin of small-scale fisheries products, which may be integrated into a broader regulatory monitoring framework.