Cristina Moreno Mariscal, PhD student at the IATA Food Sciences Laboratory, has completed a one-week training stay with the IATS Nutrigenomics group. Within the framework of his doctoral thesis co-directed by Drs. Federico Moroni (IATS) and Leticia Mora (IATA), she analyzed microbiota samples to determine the effects of a dietary additive, based on a porcine blood hydrolyzate, on the gut microbiome of gilthead sea bream. Tasks carried out by Cristina comprised learning of sampling, bacterial DNA extraction, sequencing and bioinformatic and statistical analysis of results.

PhD student Ibon García-Gallego from CCMAR (Portugal) is visiting IATS infrastructure through the AQUAEXCEL3.0 Transnational Acess (TNA) entitled FISH+ (Enhanching fish robustness through dietary functional additives). This TNA supervised by Nutrigroup Prof. Jaume Pérez-Sánchez. The TNA will analyze in the upcoming weeks the gut microbiota communities of samples from gilthead sea bream juveniles fed diets enriched with selected addtivies (thymol, butirate, taurine), in order to assess the impact of such additives on the enhancement of intestinal health of cultured fish.

Nutrigroup PhD student Ricardo Domingo-Bretón is one of the three nominees to the Student Spotlight Award granted by the EAS at the upcoming Aquaculture Europe 23 Congress (September 18-21, Vienna), with the work entitled “Gilthead sea bream microbiota shifts associated with thermal stress and dietary intervention during a record heat summer“.

This work resulted by collaboration with Nukamel company through the AQUAEXCEL3.0 Transnational Access EMULSAQUA2, with additional funding from National THINKINAZUL project. The combined effect of diet fat level and emulsifier supplementation (Volamel Aqua) was tested in juvenile gilthead sea bream during the extremely hot summer of 2022 at the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Gut microbiota was revealed as a strong biomarker of heat stress, and the feed additive turned down the microbiota dysbiosis and mimicked the microbiota changes associated to low energy diets. A nice piece of work that merited his nomination. Best of lucks for Ricardo.

The “Training course on Nutritional Innovations for Selected Aquaculture Fish” took place the 28-29 June in the Wageningen Campus, in the Netherlands. This was one of the two courses that AquaIMPACT project organized to train aquaculture professionals and students with the latest concepts about fish genomic selection and nutrition.

A total of 24 students from 9 nationalities attended the course, with lecturers belonging to research (INRAE, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, University of Stirling, CSIC, University of Insubria) or aquaculture-related (Skretting Aquaculture Research Centre) institutions. The organization of the activity was promoted by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

The IATS representation in this course was composed by Álvaro Belenguer and Fernando Naya-Català, from the Nutrigenomics Group. Álvaro showed recent research undergone by the group on sea bream nutritional programming, and explained the transcriptomics and epigenomic links after the implementation of this technique. Fernando explained the importance of the gut microbiota as a key factor to explain the relationship between fish breeding and nutritional interventions, and how this community and the host gut transcriptome can be modulated in sea bream by feed functional additives.

Beatriz Soriano successfully presented her doctoral thesis at Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio, UV-CSIC) on june 15th.

Her work, entitled “Bioinformatics solutions for the analysis of omics data, knowledge discovery and genetic diagnosis in Sparus aurata and other biological organisms” was co-directed by Carlos Llorens (Biotechvana), Jaume Pérez (IATS Nutrigenomics Group) and Vicente Arnau (I2SysBio). It was financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through a grant for contracts for the training of doctors in companies (Doctorados Industriales).

The Thesis defense was awarded with the highest distinction. Congratulations to Beatriz for her excellent work.