Nutrigenomic Approaches Improve the Efficiency of Soybean Meal Utilization in Salmonids Aquaculture

Abstract

The USDA ARS and UofI have developed several rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) lines that show higher growth rates when fed an all-plant protein diet than non-selected lines of trout fed the plant protein diet or a fishmeal-based diet. So far, no commercial breeding programs has yet started to improve feed utilization efficiency in fish, mainly because of the difficulty in accurately measuring individual feed intake of fish reared in groups. Using these selected lines we proposed to test if feed conversion ratio (FCR) and body weight variations during successive periods of feed deprivation (FD) and re-feeding (RF) are correlated using a compensatory feeding regime. The goal of this study was to determine if indirect selection for the above traits could be used to develop alternative criteria to improve feed intake of the plant-based fed selected strain.