Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In all vertebrates, food intake regulation involves intricate networks of factors that are produced by both brain and peripheral tissues and affect brain feeding centers. Our current understanding of the regulation of feeding in fish is limited and based primarily on few species. Fish, however, are a diverse group that display large variations in feeding habits and the establishment of a general model elucidating feeding regulation in fish requires information on a wide range of species. In the past years, my research has established a comprehensive and interactive model of feeding control in fish by examining appetite related hormones in several fish. The goal of my ongoing research is to identify the molecules and physiological mechanisms regulating appetite and food intake in fish, and to examine how they are modulated by nutritional status, environmental cues and reproductive events. My studies to date have provided compelling new evidence that major interspecific differences occur in the structure, sites of production and mechanisms of action of these factors. My program is unique in that it is one of the few worldwide to use an integrative (from whole animal to genes) comparative approach to examine the endocrine regulation of feeding in both freshwater and marine fish. This research is novel in that it will allow us to establish a general model of the endocrine regulation of feeding in fish and vertebrates and its impact on growth and reproduction. The results of these studies will provide new approaches to manage and enhance feeding and growth in fish. It will also allow us to better understand how different fish species deal with environmental stressors, a prerequisite for managing fish aquaculture. Our results will be highly beneficial to, and are likely to have impact on the local, national, and multi-national fishing and aquacultures industries. Also, given the similarities in the structure and function of appetite-related peptides between fish and mammals, our results could help build a fundamental model for feeding regulation in vertebrates and bring new insights into the mechanisms that rule diseases involving dysregulation of energy homeostasis in mammals.