If all goes according to Alltech president and founder Pearse Lyons’ plan, sea lice could be a seafood farming fret of the past about six months from now. 

It’s in approximately half a year’s time that the innovation company’s emerging  technology, the gene chip, could deliver the results necessary to blot out sea lice, one of the industry’s most formidable ails – and it won’t end there, Lyons explained in his keynote address during the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s GOAL 2017 conference, held in Dublin, Ireland this week from 3 to 6 October. 

On 5 August, 2017, Alltech completed the development of its gene chip for salmon and trout. The chip, heralded as a “nutrigenomics breakthrough,” allows for the measurement of “how genes are nutritionally effected,” said Lyons. 

“Nutritionally induced changes in gene expression patterns can be fingerprinted” with the technology, thus enabling the “rapid evaluation of the hidden effects of dietary and nutritional change,” Lyons said. “This is not genetic engineering. This is understanding the path of the genome.”

Alltech, which focuses on innovation in the animal health and animal feed sectors, developed the chip at its Center for Animal Nutrigenomics and Applied Animal Nutrition, located at the company’s headquarters in Kentucky, U.S.A. Currently going through its second phase of approvals with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the gene chip for salmon and trout is expected to enter phase three in six months; it has the patents in place to launch in January 2018, according to Lyons.

Source: Seafood Source // Original Article