Developing in vitro methods for identifying feed additives from new resources to support aquaculture in the face of climate change

水产养殖是一项相对较新的经济活动，但其重要性已超出经济范畴，延伸到公共卫生领域。 医生们普遍认为吃新鲜的鱼对人体健康有益。 然而，捕捞渔业正在下降，未来只有水产养殖才能提供充足的鱼类供应。 因此，维持或扩大水产养殖至关重要，但该行业面临许多挑战。 工业问题包括尽量减少对环境的影响和适应环境变化，如气候变化带来的变化。 解决这些问题的一般方法是在正常和压力条件下促进鱼饲料的有效利用。这减少了废物的排放，并允许水产养殖在全球变暖的情况下继续下去。增强胃肠道（GI）的性能可以促进有效的饲料利用。在人类医学中，通过饮食中添加营养素和保健品以及益生菌和益生菌来改善GI健康。 如果能够为鱼类确定类似的“添加剂”，将其添加到鱼类饲料中可以使水产养殖更具环境可持续性和稳健性。然而，由于用鱼进行饲养试验既费力又耗时，因此识别此类添加剂的成本很高。 我们建议开发廉价的体外试验，这意味着在培养皿中，用于筛选化学品和生物制剂促进鱼类胃肠道健康的能力。 试验将使用鱼GI肠细胞系。 这些可以无限期地保持在培养物中，并鼓励其在体外表达它们在体内（即完整的动物）执行的功能。 我们将重点关注的功能是胃肠道允许营养物质进入并阻止细菌进入的能力。 该试验将监测GI屏障在不同条件下的功能，例如加热，有或没有潜在的饲料添加剂。 我们的工业合作伙伴可以将有前途的保护性添加剂加入鱼类饲料中，支持他们的业务和加拿大水产养殖业。

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.