Monitoring and managing microbes in aquaculture - Towards a sustainable industry

Mikkel Bentzon-Tilia, Eva Sonnenschein, Lone Gram

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    Abstract

    Microorganisms are of great importance to aquaculture where they occur naturally, and can be added artificially, fulfilling different roles. They recycle nutrients, degrade organic matter and, occasionally, they infect and kill the fish, their larvae or the live feed. Also, some microorganisms may protect fish and larvae against disease. Hence, monitoring and manipulating the microbial communities in aquaculture environments hold great potential; both in terms of assessing and improving water quality, but also in terms of controlling the development of microbial infections. Using microbial communities to monitor water quality and to efficiently carry out ecosystem services within the aquaculture systems may only be a few years away. Initially, however, we need to thoroughly understand the microbiomes of both healthy and diseased aquaculture systems, and we need to determine how to successfully manipulate and engineer these microbiomes. Similarly, we can reduce the need to apply antibiotics in aquaculture through manipulation of the microbiome, i.e. by the use of probiotic bacteria. Recent studies have demonstrated that fish pathogenic bacteria in live feed can be controlled by probiotics and that mortality of infected fish larvae can be reduced significantly by probiotic bacteria. However, the successful management of the aquaculture microbiota is currently hampered by our lack of knowledge of relevant microbial interactions and the overall ecology of these systems.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalMicrobial Biotechnology
    Volume9
    Issue number5
    Pages (from-to)576-584
    Number of pages9
    ISSN1751-7907
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2016

    Bibliographical note

    This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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