Feed & Additive Magazine Issue 3 April 2021

SPECIAL STORY 70 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE April 2021 About Elena Mente Professor Elena Mente has more than 20 years’ experience on research in sustainable aquaculture and aquatic animal nutrition. Her research contributes to increasing available, accessible, affordable and nutritious aquafood and feed, while conserving natural resources and contributing to climate change mitigation (FutureEUAqua project). On-going research is related to organic aquaculture and the investiga- tion of how diet affects and to what extent the gut microbial communities and the subsequent food assimilation in aquaculture. About Katerina Kousoulaki Dr. Katerina Kousoulaki is senior researcher at Nofima (2007-today). Her research areas are downstream processing, food and feed devel- opment, and physiology, i.e., appetite regulation, metabolism, and mineralization, with special interest in novel ingredient applications. In FutureEUAqua she leads tasks related to raw material quality and salmon nutrition. She is the coordinator of AQUABIOPRO-FIT (BBI JU Horizon 2020) developing nutritional supplements for humans from fish side stream biomass. About Ioannis Nengas Dr. Ioannis Nengas holds a PhD in Fish Nutrition and he is working at the Hellenic Center for Marine Research on applied fish nutrition. Among his research experiences are the evaluation of nutritional quality of feed ingredients and feeds, nutritional requirements of aquacul- ture species, formulations of commercial diets, effect of nutrition on quality, health and defense system of fish and fish feed technology. Has participated in numerous European Union and national research projects and produced over 50 publications in peer- reviewed journals. in high quantities in the future. Those were tunicate meal, insect meal, and phototrophic and heterotrophic microalgae meals, and in the created formulations re- placed parts of fishmeal and/or fish oil, and soy-based ingredients, whereas a fishmeal, fish oil and soy-free diet was also formulated combing all the innovative ingre- dients at once. The preliminary results from these trials showed that growth rates were similar among treatments including innovative ingredients such as tunicates, in- sect meal and heterotrophic or phototrophic microalgae with reduced fish performance when both fishmeal and fish oil were removed completely from the formulation. Following the same increasing trend, marine aqua- culture industry in Mediterranean has undergone a significant growth producing traditional finfish spe- cies like, European sea bass ( Dicentrarchus labrax ) and gilthead sea bream ( Sparus aurata ). Being a rapidly expanding sector, it places enormous pressure on the aquaculture industry to find sustainable and cost-ef- fective ingredients in fish diets. Currently, few non ma- rine origin ingredients allow substantial replacement of fish meals (FM) and fish oils (FO) in sea bass and sea bream feeds without affecting fish performance. This is due to their inadequate content of essential nutrients, including protein, amino acids and minerals as well as the presence of antinutritional components. Biotechnology has recently played a significant role on animal feed improvement in the production of in- novative sustainable feed ingredients, value-addition to forage used as animal feed through processing, production of feed additives and the manipulation of rumen microbes to improve feed utilization. Algae, Bacterial protein and yeast protein constituted the innovative ingredients used for conventional and or- ganic sea bass and sea bream feeds. These ingredients were selected on the basis of potential near future availability and the condition to have the characteris- tics to be produced organically in the future. Accord- ing to their nutritional profiles these ingredients, in combination with commonly used conventional and organic raw materials, were tested in laboratory and production scale trials in commercial type aqua feeds. Both sea bass and sea bream fed the organic and conventional FutureEUAqua diets showed better growth performance when the new ingredients mix- ture (bacterial protein, yeast meal, fish meal trim- mings) inclusion in the diets was at 25% level show- ing the potential of using such innovations. Acknowledgements FutureEUAqua is funded by the H2020 program Sustainable European aquaculture 4.0: nutrition and breeding (GA nr. 817737). For References: www.feedandadditive.com