Characterizing the modification of the gut microbiome of farmed salmon as a function of feeding regimes designed to reduce summer gut syndrome in British Columbia salmon farms

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The health of farmed fish in each growing season depends on a suite of factors including local environmentalconditions, many of which are correlated with water temperature and quality. Water temperature has a stronginfluence on other important conditions such as dissolved oxygen, phytoplankton bloom and microbialbiomass, all vitally important for fish health. Aside from water temperature, optimal feeding is critical ininsuring good growth rate, a healthy immune system, and the overall quality of the food product and its marketdesirability. With warming seawater temperature, the aquaculture industry faces an increase in summer gutsyndrome (SGS) in salmon, a condition that leads to poor assimilation of the feed, and reduced growthefficiency. Cermaq Canada, a world leader in salmon aquaculture, is engaged in reducing SGS in their localVancouver Island salmon farms by considering a switch to a high temperature (HT) fish feed that may performbetter in high water temperatures. Given the increased financial costs of this new feed, the company is eager tovalidate for their specific farming location, that benefits to fish growth and general health outweigh the increasecost of the HT feed. In their validation, the company has requested the expertise of my laboratory to assess thedifferences in the salmon gut microbiome associated with the conventional and novel HT feed. My laboratorywill provide a detailed characterization of the the fish gut microbiome by Illumina Tag-sequencing of the 16SrRNA gene V4-V5 variable region amplicons for both types of feed. A written report to the company willinclude the data analysis through the QIIME pipeline, followed by a statistical analysis of the results. Inaddition, we will provide the company with a searchable database of the sequence types (operational taxonomicunits or OTUs) and its associated Master OTU table containing the relative abundance data of these OTUs ineach fish gut sample analysed.