Promoted by IATS, and with Professor Jaume Pérez as chair of the steering committee, it will be held from September 22-25, 2025 in the city of Valencia. More information: Official announcement of the European Aquaculture Society (EAS) and press release of CSIC delegation in the Valencian Community.
The first annual meeting of the R+D program in Marine Sciences, ThinkInAzul, in the Valencian Community took place on April 18 and 19 at the Catholic University of Valencia (link to CSIC Delegation press release).
These are the newest faces of Nutrigroup. Leyre Álvarez has been incorporated as project manager to handle the administrative tasks of the coordination of the Thinkinazul project. Ricardo Domingo starts his Phd with a contract from the FishNUTRIWELL project within Thinkinazul, studying the microbiome changes in fish with different nutritional and genetic background, and correlating these changes with the nutritional and taste profiles of fish fillets. Federico Moroni is a postdoctoral contracted in the framework of EU Project AQUAEXCEL3.0 to assess the meta-analysis of microbiome changes by means of new bioinformatic tools, and the adaptation of these tools for new omic approaches such as metagenomics, trnascriptomics and methylomics.
We wish them a nice and fruitful stay in the Group.
Participation of IATS Nutrigenomics Group and the interesting results on fish microbiote analysis within EU AquaIMPACT project have been highlighted in a press release (link in english) in Central CSIC and CSIC Valencian delegation websites.
The 7th Newsletter of the EU project AquaIMPACT has been released. It is focused on the main achievements of the project in 2022, and one of the chosen highlights has been the nomination of our Fernando Naya-Català for the Student Spotlight Award in in the EAS Aquaculture Europe 2022 conference.
This work was chosen as one of three most outstanding among more than 120 presentations. It is focused on the regulation of gilthead sea bream gut microbiota by genetics and nutrition, and how the adherent gut microbiota can interact with host at the transcriptional level to modulate a wide range of biological processes for preserving and improving gut health and growth performance along a 12-month production cycle. It also disclosed the high resilience and functional plasticity of the microbial community when genetically selected fish for fast growth were challenged with changes in diet composition.
Shortly after his superb presentation, this work has been published in a Special Issue (Omics Technologies Applied to Aquaculture Research) of the high-impact Open Access journal Biology.
The second e-newsletter of the European Project AQUAEXCEL3.0 has been recently released, and it highlights the contribution of the microbiome analysis platform of IATS infrastructure in the form of successful TNA works.
This platform has shown to be a reliable approach for assessment of fish health and welfare in a wide range of experimental models and processes of interest for potential AQUAEXCEL3.0 TNA users.
The TNA program of AQUAEXCEL3.0 allows external researchers to access the partners’ facilities for conduction of experiments and analysis. IATS-CSIC analytical and experimental facilities are offered to interested partners. More details about applications can be found here.
The latest update of the Stanford University list that ranks the 2% of the most influential researchers in the world (World’s Top 2% Scientists 2022) includes two researchers from our Institute. They are Professors Ariadna Sitjà-Bobadilla, from the Pathology group, and Jaume Pérez-Sánchez, from the Nutrigenomics group.
This list is based on information compiled in the Scopus database, which includes more than 8 million active scientists in the world from all disciplines. Its classification system includes not only the number of publications, but also the co-authorship level and the number of publication citations.
Other active CSIC researchers working in the field of aquaculture also ranked on this list, such as Professor Francesc Piferrer (ICM), Professors Antonio Figueras and Beatriz Novoa (IIM) and Professor Manuel Yúfera (ICMAN).
Congratulations to all!
The online activity “Precision aquaculture: how to improve production through the nutrition and health of farmed species” took place from October 24 to November 3. This is one of the five courses promoted by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID) within the framework of the INTERCOONECTA Plan for Knowledge Transfer, Exchange and Management for the Development of Spanish Cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it has been aimed at technical and managerial staff of public administrations, researchers, academics and university professors linked to the aquaculture sector. The programming of the courses has been coordinated from CSIC by Francesc Piferrer, from the Institute of Marine Sciences of Barcelona. The academic coordination of this activity has been carried out by Professor Jaume Pérez Sánchez, from the IATS Nutrigenomics group.
The course was attended by students of 17 nationalities from Latin America and the Caribbean. The different presentations on nutrition, monitoring and health in aquaculture were given by 24 speakers of 6 nationalities, belonging to CSIC centers (IATS, 10 speakers; IIM, 3; IATA, 1), universities (Universidad Miguel Hernández, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Universidad Austral de Chile, Universidad de la Sabana de Colombia) and aquaculture-related enterprises (Avramar, Bioflytech, Evonik, Sparos, Ingesom).
Researchers and students of Nutrigenomics and Fish Pathology groups of IATS have attended the 6th International Symposium on Genomics in Aquaculture, held in Granada (May 4-6). They have participated in three oral communications.
Beatriz Soriano presented SAMBA (Scanning Aquaculture Microbiome via Bayesian Approach), an application based on Bayesian networks intended to predict changes in the composition and function of mucosal microbiome in farmed fish, correlating microbial architectures with a number of biotic and abiotic factors. SAMBA also permits to interrogate the model to identify which experimental conditions are optimal for obtaining a given pan-microbiome and associated metagenome. This application will be implemented to be accessible as a web server at this site.
Fernando Naya-Català talked about the interaction of the genetic background and dietary intervention through feed additives, driving reshaping of gut microbiome in gilthead sea bream. Experimental diets oil-coated with organic acids, Bacillus-species probiotics or natural plant extracts were tested in fish selected and unselected for growth. It was demonstrated that genetics and diet interaction on gut microbiota was specific for each additive, being gut microbiota less variable in selected fish.
Socorro Toxqui Rodríguez showed the validation of Oxford Nanopore minION technology as a fast and low-cost tool for the profiling of mucosal sea bream microbiota. This technology was compared with 16S amplicon data generated by other established techniques such as MiSeq and PacBio. Her presented results provided precise insights into the advantages and disadvantages of this specific sequencing platform, and their suitability depending on the experimental approach, expected output, and cost and time constraints of a given experiment.
Prof. Jaume Pérez-Sánchez was invited by the Spanish Society of Microbiome, Probiotics and Prebiotics to give a conference at their XIII Workshop, held in Valencia (June 7-9). His talk was focused on the latest group results in National and European Projects, regarding the interplay of mucosal microbiome composition of farmed fish with culture conditions, nutrition and gentic background. The presentation is available for download here.
