Kelly Foss

Researchers in the Department of Ocean Sciences are collaborating on a $3.8 million international partnership to assess the effects of various diets on fish health at a molecular level.

The Biomarker Platform for Commercial Aquaculture Feed Development project is co-led by Dr. Matthew Rise, Department of Ocean Sciences and Dr. Richard Taylor, senior research scientist at EWOS Innovation, (the research and development arm of EWOS Canada) and EWOS, (a world-leading fish feed producer).

Together with Dr. Chris Parrish, also with the Department of Ocean Sciences, the team will use genomics technologies and lipid biochemistry to fine-tune feed formulas that include non-marine products (such as landbased plants) for maximizing fish performance and to develop clinical feeds that will combat disease.

“Part of the impetus of this project is that the fish oil and fish meal traditionally used in salmon feeds is from forage fish, (like anchovies, herring and capelin), the supply of which has plateaued and may actually be decreasing, while aquaculture is continuing to grow to supply the global demand for fish,” said Dr. Rise. “So there’s a need to find alternatives that promote growth and health but are economically feasible and sustainable.”

One of the oils the team is testing is rapeseed, from which canola is derived.

“This oil differs chemically from any that these animals would feed on in the wild,” explained Dr. Parrish. “So the biochemistry changes. When you start to replace a huge amount of fish oil with terrestrial seed oils, this leads to issues of how well the animals deal with what (to them) is a very unusual fatty acid profile.”

Dr. Parrish is responsible for investigating this side of the project, while Dr. Rise’s group uses functional genomics techniques to identify and validate health-relevant biomarker genes that respond to diets or diet ingredients.

Dr. Rise is using microarrays, or gene chips, which have tens of thousands of genes printed on them, to identify genes that respond to a diet that has a favourable effect on growth or disease resistance. Microarrays enable a complete picture of how these new diets are affecting performance and health.

The expected outcome of this project is a set of the best and most predictive molecular biomarkers that can be used as a tool to screen new feed ingredients and diets in order to give an overall set of data on how these diets affect fish health. While advantageous to the feed producers, the development of these advanced diets would also benefit aquaculture producers in Canada and around the world.

Team members from Memorial include Maryam Beheshti Foroutani (a master’s student working with Dr. Parrish), PhD student Khalil Eslamloo, and post-doctoral fellow Dr. Albert Caballero Solares, (both working with Dr. Rise). The team also includes a full time technician, Xi Xue, two parttime technicians, Jennifer Hall and Jeanette Wells, and part-time project manager Cara Kirkpatrick.

As the research and feeding trials with various diets continue at Memorial, other feeding trials in this project are also ongoing at EWOS Innovation in Norway. Dr. Rise reports that the project has also increased collaboration here at home.

“Chris and I have started working more closely together,” he said. “The cooperation of a molecular gene expression lab and a fatty acid/lipids biochemistry lab is a very powerful collaboration that you don’t see very often. That’s one advantage of having different complementary people in the same institution.”

They are also making full use of the facilities at the Ocean Sciences Centre at Logy Bay – in particular, the Dr. Joe Brown Aquatic Research Building (JBARB) and the ColdOcean Deep-Sea Research Facility (CDRF).

“The work really leverages previous federal and provincial investments into the Ocean Sciences Centre,” added Dr. Rise. “It couldn’t happen if we didn’t have the worldclass infrastructure that we have here. The JBARB is currently running a large-scale feeding trial in 28 tanks. That’s a lot of fish, which requires husbandry skills, water quality monitoring and more skills and services which constitute the expertise of the JBARB team. We expect our new Canada Foundation for Innovation and Research & Development Corporation-funded CDRF building will also become a big part of the project for histology, microscopy, flow cytometry, and possibly bio-containment requirements.”

Dr. Rise’s lab contains equipment funded by CFI as well as RDC. Dr. Parrish’s lipid biochemistry equipment was primarily funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), with RDC also providing funding for students.

Drs. Rise and Parrish worked closely with EWOS Innovation and Genome Atlantic to develop the proposal and secure funding. The project is funded in part by Genome Canada through their Genomic Applications Partnership Program, a competition designed to encourage industry-academic collaborations to increase innovation and competitiveness through genomics.

Ewos Innovation matched Genome Canada’s contribution to help fund the project.