It's nearly impossible to know exactly where your food came from before it's served on your dinner plate. Now, thanks to rapid DNA sequencing, consumers can find out if the food they're about to eat is what the supplier
says it is, as well as if it contains any food borne illnesses. Fish and other seafood are the main focus; common contaminants include salmonella, campylobacter, and
Escherichia coli. "Each year food borne illnesses caused by these microorganisms sicken 48 million Americans, hospitalize 128,000, and kill 3,000" (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
One trend on the rise is being called "food fraud". In a 2014 study, an international conservation organization discovered that one third of 1,215 seafood samples and 46 fish types from 674 retailers in 21 states were mislabeled! DNA sequencing could eliminate this potentially dangerous problem by using genome sequencing to check the authenticity of the food being sold and can also create databases of food borne strains.
Plans for the future include performing whole genome sequencing on 100,000 different types of common pathogens found in food. This technique lets scientists differentiate between strains of microbes and can stop outbreaks before it spreads. This project has already proven to be successful. Just last year the FDA was able to stop a Listeria outbreak that killed one and made 7 others sick. The strain was linked back to a single company which then stopped production.
Another way food fraud can be prevented is through The International Barcode of Life (iBOL). This large project has put together a huge "genetic library" of all the life on Earth. Each specie in the database has it's own identifiable "barcode". This system has also been successful when the CDC used it to identify poisonous puffer fish that were being sold as non-poisonous pufferfish in the U.S. This helped put a stop to an incident dubbed "sushigate". Similar to this barcode system, one company called DNATrek is creating synthetic bar codes that can be applied directly to food so that they can be scanned to see where they came from. It's possible that one day these scans could be completed with the wave of your cell phone over your food.
I found this article interesting because I think checking the authenticity of food and checking for foodborne pathogens is extremely important, especially in today's world. Consumers don't really know where their food comes from or the potential harm it can cause.
