Recently, as the innovation team of the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, the “Innovation Team of the Yangtze River Characteristic Aquatic Animal Breeding” of FFRC has made new progress in the research of total artificial breeding and feeding domestication of freshwater drum.

Fig. 1 Researcher Xu Pao led a team to tackle the problem of the total artificial breeding of freshwater drum

Freshwater drum has the advantages of delicious meat, high nutritional value (high protein, amino acid and unsaturated fatty acid content), high edible rate, no intermuscular spines, and suitable for processing. It is a high-quality aquatic animal protein source. Researcher Xu Pao and Wen Haibo led the team to overcome many difficulties. Through domestication and cultivation of the F1 generation parents, the F2 generation of freshwater drum fry was obtained, and the artificial large-scale breeding of the fry was realized, which has realized the total artificial scale breeding of fry and laid a solid foundation for the scale breeding of freshwater drum fry and industrialization of aquaculture in China.

Freshwater drum is a carnivorous fish and mainly feeds on benthic organisms and fish in nature. Therefore, the domestication of artificial compound feed is a major problem restricting the artificial culture of freshwater drum. After scientific research, the research group designed a pond domestication model and conduct a 4-month artificial compound feed domestication experiment on freshwater drum seedlings 21 days after hatching. The results showed that Pseudomonas and its regulated feeding-related genes are potential targets for changing the feeding of freshwater drum, providing an important theoretical basis for feed domestication. On this basis, the research group also screened the feeding attractants that can effectively regulate Pseudomonas, and carried out scientific and effective research on feed domestication and feeding habit transformation.

Fig. 2 Molecular mechanism of Pseudomonas in feed regulating of freshwater drum

The related research paper “Gut Microbes Reveal Pseudomonas Medicates Ingestion Preference via Protein Utilization and Cellular Homeostasis Under Feed Domestication in Freshwater Drum, Aplodinotus grunniens” was published in Frontiers in Microbiology, an authoritative journal in the field of microbiology (impact factor 6.064, JCR District 1). Dr. Song Changyou from the Genetic Center of the Biotechnology Laboratory is the first author, and Associate Researcher Li Hongxia and Researcher Xu Pao are the corresponding authors. Link to full text: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.861705