How can natural compounds supplemented in eggs improve digestive efficiency in fish larvae? In ovosupplementation of spermine as promoter of early digestive system maturation

• Autor(a) principal: Dias, Diogo Cabeleira
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/15358
• topic: Aquacultura sustentável; Eficiência digestiva; Espermina; Programação; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Naturais::Outras Ciências Naturais

The world Human population is growing, and it is expected to reach almost 10 billion until 2050. The dietary protein trends in developing countries are changing from vegetable and cereal to animal sources. The superimposition of these anthropogenic factors will, if solutions are not found, increase the pressure on the already fragilized natural resources. Aquaculture is a growing animal production sector that may be the one of the solutions for supplying the world with food, specifically marine products, while reducing the pressure on natural stocks and having the minimum impact on the environment. Nonetheless fish production has some major bottlenecks concerning, for example, sustainable feed production and fish juveniles’ supply. This is mostly due to the need to replace the typically provided live feeds with microdiets, specifically tailored to meet fish larvae´s nutritional needs, but still with constraints derived from fish larvae digestive inability to digest and assimilate the nutrients provided in these diets. For this reason, the objective of this study was to test the viability of early metabolic programing in Solea seneganelensis, a marine fish species with high commercial value, by supplementing eggs with three different amounts of spermine. Spermine, a polyamine shown to promote the maturation of the gut, was delivered through a novel technique for in ovo supplementation named sonophoresis. Each treatment was done in triplicate from egg stage until 35 days after hatching (DAH) larvae. Results demonstrate the short- and long-term safety of both, sonophoresis technique and in ovo supplementation with spermine. Regarding gut maturation, some degree of improvement in terms of lipolytic capacity were observed at 14 DAH in Sole from LOW and MED treatments. In the future, sonophoresis may become a keystone in early metabolic programing and the supplementation of spermine may generate more pronounced results if trials are conducted through longer periods and/or spermine supplementation is done through the dietary route.