bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/826032; this version posted October 31, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 MinION sequencing of seafood in Singapore reveals creatively labelled flatfishes, confused 2 roe, pig DNA in squid balls, and phantom crustaceans 3 4 Jonathan K. I. Ho1,#, Jayanthi Puniamoorthy1#, Amrita Srivathsan1*, Rudolf Meier1* 5 1. Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 6 4, Singapore 117543 7 * Corresponding authors,
[email protected],
[email protected] 8 # First authors 9 Keywords: mislabelling, fraud, food safety, DNA barcoding 10 Abstract 11 Food mislabelling is a growing world-wide problem that is increasingly addressed 12 through the authentication of ingredients via techniques like mass spectrometry or DNA- 13 sequencing. However, traditional DNA sequencing methods are slow, expensive, and 14 require well-equipped laboratories. We here test whether these problems can be 15 overcome through the use of Nanopore sequencing. We sequenced 92 single and 13 16 mixed-species samples bought in supermarkets and restaurants in Singapore which has a 17 large and diverse seafood trade. We successfully obtained DNA barcodes for 94% and 18 100% of the single- and mixed-species products after correcting the numerous 19 sequencing errors of MinION reads with a correction pipeline optimized for DNA 20 barcodes. We find comparatively low levels of clear-cut mislabelling for single-species 21 samples (7.6 %) while the rates are higher for mixed-species samples (38.5 %).