Food Authentication of Seafood Species

Abstract Food components are regularly adulterated, either deliberately or unintentionally, and this may lead to substitutions of a species by a similar but lower-quality counterpart, mislabeling of products, and therefore to commercial fraud. The authentication of food products is a request from consumers and industry, and accordingly global food regulations have been implemented in order to fight against food adulteration and mislabeling. Many different instrumental techniques have been proposed for species authentication in foodstuffs as tools to comply with food labeling regulations and policies. Although traditional methods such as liquid and gas chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared and fluorescence spectroscopy, capillary electrophoresis, and more recently, immunological technologies (e.g., ELISA) and DNA approaches are still being used, they are now being complemented by proteomics-based approaches employing electrophoretic and mass spectrometry methodologies. In this chapter, we offer a comprehensive and updated overview of the proteomics-related studies that have been applied to date for the species authentication in seafood products.