Breeding and nutrition research aimed at improving farmed fish

The continued growth in the fish farm sector is set to receive a further boost from next-generation selective breeding programmes which, along with novel nutritional protocols, could lead to fish with better disease resistance and improved quality and processing traits.

Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute is set to be a partner in a European Union research project aimed at integrating the fields of fish breeding and nutrition to increase the competiveness of EU’S aquaculture of four main species of farmed fish – Atlantic salmon, rainbow trout, gilthead seabream and European seabass – which account for more than 75 per cent of farmed fish.

With Europeans consuming around 24.5kg of farmed fish each year, a figure which continues to rise by around 5 per cent each year, the AQUAIMPACT project is aimed at providing healthy food in a sustainable fashion.

Antti Kause, who heads the Europe-wide research consortium working on the project said machine learning and the “Internet of Things” would be used to help provide added value for feed development, genotyping, trait recording and data processing in breeding programmes.

The Roslin Institute will focus on developing lowcost solutions for genomic selection for disease resistance, as well as how early life nutrition can affect the growth and health of farmed fish in later life.