Eggs the clue to faster growing fish
THE US based start-up GenetiRate has already hit the ground running, having won the Seafood Innovation Award at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum in February, and being chosen for the third Hatch accelerator programme, staged in Hawaii this summer.
The company, founded by Dr Benjamin Renquist from the University of Arizona, has developed technology that can select for better growth and feed efficiency.
If growth rates can be increased, the amount of time salmon need to spend in marine cages can be reduced and their exposure to disease limited, he said.
Selection to improve growth tends to rely on increasing feed intake, but that drives up costs.
‘There is no current method to select for feed efficiency or growth that is independent of feed intake,’ Renquist told the conference.
‘That is where GenetiRate comes in. We measure the metabolic rate of the egg using a high throughput screening method to identify faster growing individuals, independent of food intake.’
He said they can run the procedure on hundreds of thousands of eggs at a time, it doesn’t kill the fish and allows the team to assess growth potential independent of feed intake.
The technique has been tested with 18,000 tilapia eggs, with a 28 per cent improvement in growth all the way to harvest size in the top 4,500 ova.
And in trials with rainbow trout eggs, the company found a 27 per cent improvement in growth rates.
‘Not only do we improve growth but we improve feed efficiency. A lot of you would say of course if you improve growth you improve feed efficiency, and that’s a given because we are decreasing the relative role of basal metabolic rate.
‘But our feed efficiency improvement is a result of something we’ve selected for. If we take those animals that have high metabolic rate as eggs or as embryos, and we take a skeletal muscle biopsy from those fish to assess the basal metabolic rate of the fish, we decrease the basal metabolic rate of the fish.
‘So we’ve allowed this fish to put more energy towards growth because we’ve decreased basal metabolic rate, we’ve selected for that.’
Renquist said the company’s value proposition was to genetics company customers, who may want to select the top 10 per cent of ova.
‘If we were to get the 25 per cent improvement in growth…with five per cent improvement in feed efficiency [shown in trials], a female salmon would be worth $11,221 more than a salmon we haven’t selected, throughout the production cycle.’
Producer customers might want to select the top 50 per cent, in which case a GenetiRate egg could be worth $1.12 more.
Since February this year, when GenetiRate won the North Atlantic Seafood Forum award, it has had sales of $72,000, and has three large genetic companies (including Hendrix Genetics) as customers, and smaller producer companies.
The technology has been tested in salmon, trout, oysters, catfish and tilapia, and they have developed an automated sorter. This will enable a throughput of 120,000 eggs an hour, and with more sorters they could do millions of eggs a day.
Renquist said they expect validation grow-out trials to begin this month, and are looking for people to get involved in that.
The intention is to focus on salmonids, offering low coast trials using the technology, but they would look at new species each year.
‘We guarantee a five per cent improvement in growth so we’re taking the risk, not the producer.’
They envisage three different routes to market: licensing deals for the automated sorter, which works with all the company’s software; an on-site service; or in-house services for those animals that are easily shipped.
This year, he said they expect $250,000 in revenue, and in 2020 to exceed $1 million, and in 2021 to exceed $5 million in sales.
“We guarantee a five per cent improvement in growth so we’re taking the risk, not the producer”