Cell-based aquaculture

Editor/Mohamed Shihab

Aquaculture has been growing very fast and facing several challenges to meet the rising demand ensuring the safety and quality of fishery products. The concept of producing cell-based seafood has been emerging as a new approach to producing alternate animal protein. This alternative approach of animal protein production from fish would address several key challenges faced by the conventional aquaculture systems and declining marine capture fisheries. This alternative fish production system will reduce pressure on natural resources and the environment. Accordingly, the entire world is moving towards climate-resilient production systems and in vitro meat production has emerged as an area of cutting edge and priority research. The successful launch of the in vitro hamburger in 2013 has accelerated the research focus on cell-based meats [71]. The ease of growing fish cells at a lower temperature compared to mammalian cells may give cost benefits to the production of cellular fish meat as compared to cellular animal meat. Tissue engineering blend with modern aquaculture techniques can be explored to utilize marine cell culture as an attractive opportunity for the production of in vitro fish meat. Fish muscle cell culture can be used for in vitro fish meat production by exploiting their salient physiological properties like tolerance to a hypoxic-conditions, high buffering capacity, and lower temperature [2]. Fish muscle cell cultures are more adaptable to in vitro conditions than mammalian ones and hence in vitro meat production will be more feasible with fish muscle cell cultures. More concerted efforts and investigations are required to generate information on fish and shellfish muscle cell culture systems to suit in vitro fish meat production systems. The fastest possible path to produce cellular fish meat should start with zebrafish for research and development purposes [72].

The importance of genetic modification and closed aquaculture system paves the way for the innovative concept of cell-based fish production i.e. cellular aquaculture [73]. American space organization NASA had supported the first research program on in vitro edible muscle protein production from goldfish for space travelers during long-term manned space exploration [74]. A better understanding of the myogenesis involved in the muscle cell and tissue culture would be essential to trap the benefits of muscle cell culture in promoting cellular aquaculture. In vitro models like C2C12 cell lines have been utilized in understanding molecular mechanisms underlying muscle growth and differentiation in mammals [2]. Such studies are in the infancy stage in teleost due to the unavailability of equivalent permanent muscle cell lines except for a few fish muscle cell lines [75–77, 77]. Most of them are not  rely on the development of appropriate cell lines, optimization of growth media, and other factors, mass production of cells. Some institutes like Good Food Institute; New York, USA have taken initiatives to develop cell-based seafood.

The cell-based molecular mechanism studies will provide basic research data for cell-based fish production. Some investigations on harvested native muscle tissues from fresh water and marine fish provide interesting insights into the potentials of developing a muscle cell culture system [81, 82]. The genome editing by CRISPR/Cas9 system is a promising tool that attains targeted gene editing with high efficiency, without the requirement of integrating an exogenous gene. Its potential is yet to be exploited much in aquaculture using fish cell lines. CRISPR/Cas9 system has been used to get higher skeletal muscle/ muscular growth in aquaculture species like red sea bream; Pagrus major [83] and channel catfish; Ictalurus punctatus [84]. Clean meat farm is a million-dollar industry but academic research lags to propagate clean meat production [85]. Academic research focusing on the development of muscle cell culture systems, standardization media, and bioreactor facilities for large-scale cell production would be required to accelerate in vitro fish meat production and bring it to market.

M. Goswami, 1 B. S. Yashwanth,1 Vance Trudeau,2 and W. S. Lakra3
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