The results of a multinational study on whether DNA microchip technology can be used in species analysis of fish have now been published in the journal Marine Biotechnology. The authors of the article include Dr. Sigríður Hjörleifsdóttir, Dr. Guðmundur Óli Hreggviðsson and Dr. Viggó Marteinsson, who are all Matís employees.
Research groups from eight European countries worked on a study funded by the EU and completed in 2006. Little is known about species variability, changes in the proportions of individual species and the functioning of marine ecosystems. The main reasons are that sampling and analysis are often problematic. It is difficult to identify many marine organisms at the egg and larval stage, animal and plant life and microscopic benthic animals. Microscopic analysis is extremely time consuming and requires a great deal of expertise. Species analyzes based on DNA analyzes are constantly gaining ground and are well suited for such analyzes, as it has been found that they can be very powerful.
As stated earlier, the subject of the study was to examine whether DNA microchip technology could be developed to identify fish species. Species-identified genes (16S rRNA) from mitochondria from fish from European waters were used. Eleven important fish species were selected in the prototype of the microchip. Short probes were designed from 16S rDNA sequences from 230 individuals from 27 fish species. The pairing of 16S rDNA fragments from the eleven species with a mixture of corresponding microarrays on the microchip revealed that this technology is particularly suitable and is sufficiently specific. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the 16S rRNA gene is well suited for designing short probes that can be used to distinguish between fish species.
This gives good hope that in the future it will be possible to develop a fish chip ("Fish Chip") with sensors for approx. 50 important fish species, which could speed up and increase the reliability of species analyzes of fish and fish products. Such a chip could also be used for research in the ecology of the ocean, in fisheries management and for tracking and classifying fish products.