Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Aquaculture is a relatively new economic activity, but its importance extends beyond economics into public health. Physicians largely agree that eating fresh fish is beneficial to human health. However, the capture fisheries are declining and only aquaculture can provide an adequate supply of fish in the future. Thus maintaining or expanding aquaculture is essential but the industry faces many challenges. Industry problems include minimizing the environmental impact and adapting to environmental changes, such as those brought about by climate change. A general approach to these problems is to promote the efficient utilization of fish feed, under both normal and stressful conditions. This reduces the release of waste, and allows aquaculture to continue, despite global warming. Enhancing the performance of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract can promote efficient feed utilization. In human medicine, improving GI health is being sought through dietary additions of nutrients and nutraceuticals and pre- and pro-biotics. If similar 'additives' could be identified for fish, their addition to fish feed could make aquaculture more environmentally sustainable and robust. However, because running feeding trials with fish is laborious and time consuming, identifying such additives is expensive. We are proposing to develop inexpensive assays to be done in vitro, which means in a culture dish, for screening chemicals and biological agents for their ability to promote fish GI health. The assays will use fish GI intestinal cell lines. These can be maintained indefinitely in culture and encouraged to express in vitro functions that they perform in vivo, which is the intact animal. The functions that we will focus on are the GI tracts ability to allow nutrients in and keep bacteria out. The assays will monitor the functioning of the GI barrier under different conditions, such as heat, with or without potential feed additives. Promising protective additives can be incorporated into fish feed by our industrial partner, supporting their business and Canadian aquaculture.