Filip Rotnes

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 ...

A project for the Digital Salmon use case in BT8121 - Transdisciplinary biotechnology - a Digital Life Norway course.

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 ...

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 ...