Integrating Natural Tags to Track Seafood Provenance

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, seafood product chemical signatures are considered to be promising tools for the determination of food provenance, to tackle fraud, promote sustainable harvesting and production and build consumer trust, making the development of innovative tools and frameworks enabling us to determine seafood provenance crucial. These tools can include approaches using a suite of chemical natural tags such as element and isotopic compositions of soft tissues and hard biogenic structures (e.g., otoliths and shells), organic molecule chemical profiles (e.g., fatty acid profiles) or genomic approaches. In addition, a wide range of statistical chemometric approaches, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, can also be used to gather all the seafood product chemical characteristics from different provenances, and support the development of classification tools to validate the chemical profile from seafood products originating from different geographical origins, having the potential to refine provenance appraisals and generate outcomes not always readily anticipated by single markers. These chemical profiles also provide nutritional information regarding the seafood product, while simultaneously supporting certification frameworks for an added value of food products. Within this framework, this Special Issue will cover review articles, short communications and research papers addressing the application of chemical, biochemical and elemental tags with the purpose of tracking seafood product provenance and production methods, as well as statistical and chemometric approaches to improve the identification of the origin of seafood.

Dr. Bernardo Duarte
Dr. Vanessa F. Fonseca
Dr. Susanne Tanner
Dr. Maria Olga Varrà
Dr. Patrick Reis-Santos
Dr. Ronnie S. Concepcion II
Guest Editors

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