Arne Gjuvsland

Towards the Digital Salmon: From a reactive to a pre-emptive research strategy in aquaculture (DigiSal)

Salmon farming in the future must navigate conflicting and shifting demands of sustainability, shifting feed prices, disease, and product quality. The industry needs to develop a flexible, integrated basis of knowledge for rapid response to new challenges. Project DigiSal will lay the foundations for a Digital Salmon: an ensemble of mathematical descriptions of salmon physiology, combining ...

Salmon farmed on modern feeds contains less of the healthy, long-chain fatty acids (EPA and DHA) than before. Up until the turn of the millennium, farmed salmon were fed fish oil as a replacement for their omega-3 rich natural prey. However, fish oil is now a scarce resource, and more than half of the fat in modern feeds comes from plant oils that are inexpensive, but devoid of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. How can we increase the omega-3 content of salmon on sustainable feeds?

One option is ...

This experiment is designed to pinpoint where in the metabolic network there are differences between salmon of different genetic families and on different diets. Analyses of this material will help inform feeding and breeding strategies.

Salmon will be reared on feeds with contrasting levels of very-long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. Then some fish will be crossed over to the other diet while others remain as controls. This perturbation of diet should provoke changes in omega-3 metabolism ...

Spreadsheet of weight, length and sex of fish sampled after feed switch between vegetable and marine oil, in September 2015 (freshwater) and January 2016 (seawater).

Spreadsheet columns are:

• Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
• Day (day zero is the day before first feeding with new feed)
• Inputter (person entering data into Excel)
• Tank (1, 2, 4, 5 with Atlantic salmon, 3 and 6 with rainbow trout)
• Section (tanks were divided in half using perforated walls)
• Treatment (explained in sheet "treatments")

...

Fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) analysis showing which fatty acids were in the samples, though not what specific lipids they were part of (triacylglycerides, phospholipids, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_methyl_ester

Values in Ark1!A2:AO21 are probably mass percent of total FAME, including C19:0 added for calibration. Sample identifiers are lab-local; GSF1 identifiers are in Ark5!A4:U22 but suffer from typos. Use caution and see below.

This workbook is a mess:

• Results appear in ...

Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is the most valuable farmed fish globally and there is much interest in optimizing its genetics and rearing conditions for growth and feed efficiency. Marine feed ingredients must be replaced to meet global demand, with challenges for fish health and sustainability. Metabolic models can address this by connecting genomes to metabolism, which converts nutrients in the feed to energy and biomass, but such models are currently not available for major aquaculture species ...

Describes how the DNA was isolated from salmon intestinal samples before preparations of 16S rRNA gene amplicons for the Illumina MiSeq system.