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Jan 6, 2020

U.S. consumers might get their first taste of transgenic salmon this year

AquaBounty’s fish is the world’s first bioengineered animal approved for human consumption Inside a row of nondescript buildings in the small town of Albany, in northeast Indiana—approximately 1,000 kilometers from the nearest coast—Atlantic salmon are sloshing around in fiberglass tanks. Only in the past five years has it become possible to raise thousands of healthy fish so far from the shoreline without contaminating millions of gallons of fresh water. A technology called recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) now allows indoor aquaculture farms to recycle up to 99 percent of the water they use. And the newest generation of these systems will help one biotech company bring its unusual fish to U.S. customers for the first time this year. For AquaBounty Technologies, which owns and operates the Indiana facility, this technology couldn’t have come at a better time. The company has for decades tried to introduce a transgenic salmon it sells under the brand name AquAdvantage to the U.S. market. In this quest, AquaBounty has lost between US $100 million and $115 million (so far). In the final months of 2020, the company will harvest its first salmon raised in the United States and intended for sale there. Thanks to modifications that involved splicing genetic material into its salmon from two other species of fish, these salmon grow twice as fast and need 25 percent less food to reach the same weight as salmon raised on other fish farms. Since AquAdvantage salmon are genetically modified, the company has taken special precautions to reduce the odds that these fish could reproduce in the wild. Raising all the salmon indoors, far away from wild populations, is key to that equation. And that strategy wouldn’t be possible without modern recirculating systems.  Read the article.