Salmon genes can give more oil

Researchers are on a mission to extract more omega-3 oil from Salmon genes, says a report.

The main purpose is to make salmon the bet producer of mega -3 oil. Gerd Marit Berge is a feed scientist at Nofima, and is focused on the fact that we balance considerations about the amount of omega-3 in the fillet with considerations about the limited resources in the sea. He said that everybody knows that having salmon means getting more of marine omega-3, but at the same time out of consideration to resources it is essential to reduce the use of fish oil, which is the main source of marine omega-3.

Berge said that by using cell cultures, they can test many different combinations so that they can more quickly arrive at the best ones. They will then test these out on salmon families that we believe are good and less good at utilizing the resources. The scientists will search for a gene that produces the enzyme desaturase in the salmon families of breeding company SalmoBreed. They will select families with high and low expression of desaturase for the feeding trial.

This project is supported by the Research Council of Norway. It is headed by Nofima and run in collaboration with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), SalmoBreed AS and BioMar AS.

Source: megafishnet.com"

WorldFishingToday d. 18-02-2011