The European aquaculture industry holds great promise as a provider of nutrient rich food to an increasing population. However, disease is a major constraint to the development of this food sector. Thus, to ensure a sustaining and continued growth of the production, there is a need for an increased focus directed towards the development of effective approaches to prevent and control diseases in aquaculture species.
One possibility is to develop functional feed ingredients that provide specific benefits to the fish. Such ingredients may be biologically active compounds, recovered from seafood processing by-products. This project aims to develop novel functional feed ingredients for the aquaculture industry through facilitating the recovery and utilization of valuable bioactive peptides from the salmon industry in Norway and the sea bass/sea bream industry in Italy.
State of the art techniques within peptidomics and bioinformatics (often referred to as the in silico approach) will be used to identify peptides with predicted anti-inflammatory, immunostimulatory or anti-microbial properties in the different fractions of by-products.
Based on the results, targeted hydrolysis and processing of the by-products will be performed to obtain fractions enriched in the relevant bioactive peptides.
Assessments will be made of the degree of purification and up-concentration required before inclusion of these fractions in the feed formulations. The efficacy of the compounds as health promoting and disease-preventing ingredients will be assessed through in vitro studies and in vivo fish feed trials.
The project brings together a multidisciplinary team of scientists holding competence within bioinformatics, peptidomics, molecular and cellular biology, in vitro/in vivo assessment, aquaculture feed development, and bioprocessing, and represents a unique opportunity for knowledge transfer across competence fields and different aquaculture species.
