Project description
Boosting aquaculture sustainability through nutritional programming
Aquaculture provides half of the world’s fish supply, making it the fastest-growing food production sector. To meet future global food demands sustainably, reducing fishery products in aquafeed and using alternative ingredients is essential. Nutritional programming is a promising strategy to boost production efficiency, improve fish health, and reduce environmental impact. However, the mechanisms behind the epigenetic changes induced by early nutritional interventions remain unclear. The ERC-funded EPIAQUA project aims to unravel these mechanisms using Nile tilapia as a model. EPIAQUA will explore how carbohydrates and fatty acids in early diets affect the fish epigenome and its transgenerational inheritance, potentially revolutionising sustainable aquafeed use and advancing aquaculture sustainability.
Objective
Aquaculture supplies half of the fish consumed by humans, being the fastest growing food production sector worldwide. Reducing the use of fishery products in aquafeed by replacing them with more sustainable ingredients is a must to reach sustainability and meet future global food needs. In this sense, nutritional programming is a promising strategy with potential to increase production efficiency and fish health and minimize environmental impact. Epigenetics is thought to be responsible for the beneficial effects of early nutritional intervention, but, the mechanisms by which different types of nutritional interventions induce epigenetic modifications, and which ones they induce is largely unknown. EPIAQUA is an innovative and timely project that will unravel the multi-layered epigenetic entanglement underlying nutritional programming and its transgenerational inheritance, using Nile Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) as a model, paving the way for advances in the use of sustainable aquafeeds. Specific goals are: 1) to elucidate cause-effect relationship of carbohydrate content and dietary fatty acids early intervention on the multi-layered epigenome, 2) to generate a better mechanistic understanding of the phenotypic changes induced by nutritional early intervention, and 3) to demonstrate the presence of epigenetic marks transgenerationally inherited and characterize the mechanisms underlying it. The new hypothesis that lncRNAs play a key role in the transmission and long-lasting effects of nutritionally mediated phenotypes is central to this proposal, being one of its ground-breaking elements and having major translational impacts. Moreover, EPIAQUA outcomes will provide novel mechanistic insights into the role of epigenetics in nutritional programming and identify novel epigenetic markers involved in tailoring metabolic pathways for better use of sustainable aquafeeds, what in turn will drive changes in husbandry protocols, and improve aquaculture sustainability.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesfisheries
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculescarbohydrates
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsepigenetics
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
38200 San Cristobal de La Laguna
Spain