Scientists invent way to make farmed salmon healthier and better for you
Scientists have invented a way to make farmed salmon healthier.
Feeding fish with a new type of rapeseed oil, which includes a natural red pigment, makes pink seafood richer in omega-3 oils and filled with more antioxidants, a study has found.
The pinkness of a fish, whether shrimp, trout or salmon, comes from consumption of a chemical called astaxanthin, which is produced by some algae in the wild.
Wild fish eat this in their diet and become pink as a result, but farmed fish do not and as a result have naturally grey flesh.
These fish are therefore fed synthetic versions of this chemical to make the aesthetically pleasing hue consumers desire.
But a genetically modified variant of the crop, which is spliced with genes from the scarlet flax flower, creates a plant that naturally produces seeds rich in astaxanthin.
DNA, which powers the pigment-making pathway, was injected into the crop's own genome and small batches were grown at trial sites in the US and UK.
Published in the Plant Biotechnology journal, data show that in each gram of seed from this new crop, there are 136 micrograms of colourful pigments. More than a third (47 micrograms) is astaxanthin.
Giving this to fish in their diet to make them pink, instead of the current synthetic astaxanthin, would make the salmon healthier and better to eat, scientists say.
In another experiment by the same scientists at Rothamsted University, oil made from these plants was given to 120 rainbow trout in four tanks. The study was later published in the journal Aquaculture.
These animals grew just as big and were richer in health chemicals such as omega-3, the study found.
Prof Johnathan Napier, a plant biotechnology pioneer who led the work at Rothamsted, told The Telegraph: 'The plant-based source of the pigment is accumulated and delivers benefits to the fish.
'In particular, it can help reduce the build-up of pro-inflammatory molecules.
'We are also hoping to see if having diets in which the plant-derived astaxanthin is present makes them more resistant to disease (especially lice) and stress – that work is ongoing.'
The fish which eat the new oil are healthier, he said, and the humans that eat the fish are also set to benefit from the change.
Prof Napier said: 'One would hope that fish being fed this diet would be more healthy [sic],'
'Astaxanthin helps to reduce oxidation, and therefore protects the fish's metabolic state as well as protecting the healthy omega-3s and then we consume and get health benefits for ourselves.
'And there is also an additional potential benefit from having the astaxanthin in your diet, as an antioxidant.'
The scientists who invented the new plant used genetic modification techniques to create the astaxanthin-rich rapeseed oil. It is not possible to grow this crop commercially in the UK because the UK still uses the EU legislation prohibiting genetically modified (GM) foods.
GM foods are allowed in the US and Prof Napier believes fish and farmers over there will be able to benefit from this new product in less than ten years.
Red tape around the use of GM foods in UK agriculture, he believes, is stifling the market and also preventing foods which
Prof Napier said: 'Tax revenue is being used to fund millions of pounds' worth of fundamental research in UK universities and institutes.
'But the potential arising from any useful discoveries is not correctly captured or exploited because of regulatory burdens.
'In the specific example of GM crops, we are still lumbered with the EU regulations, so we are double-whammied.'
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Octopus boom along England's southwest coast down to 'perfect storm'
Octopuses, sharks and tuna that are booming in the sea around the UK could be part of a fundamental shift in the marine environment, a leading scientist has told Sky News. Dr Simon Thomas, from the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, said a perfect storm of factors, including climate change and overfishing, is leading to a rapid change in the species being found around the coast. "Since 2016, you've seen a lot of our traditional fish, like cod, ling and pollock decreasing in numbers and pushing northwards," he said. "Then we've seen other fish, especially things like bluefin tuna and blue sharks, being found in huge numbers in the water here. "It's almost like you've seen a complete shift in the regime of the ocean." 'I've never seen anything like it' Fishermen on the south coast of Devon and Cornwall are currently catching huge numbers of a large octopus species that is normally rare in the UK. "I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime," said Dr Thomas. "I've spent 40 years at sea and probably seen three or four of the big octopus over the years. Now they are seen regularly and (crab fishermen) are reporting their pots have been decimated." The octopuses are raiding crab and lobster pots for an easy meal. But there are so many of them, and they are so hungry, that fishermen say they are eating not only the bait and crustaceans, but also, at times, each other. Sam Jago, skipper of the Bosloe, returned to Plymouth after a day's fishing with 11 crates of octopuses - a 400kg bonanza that could fetch almost £3,000 at market rates. But he had just over one tub of crabs and lobsters - when normally he'd have more than a dozen. "They crack the shell and suck everything out of it," he said. "It's a quick buck at the moment, but who knows how long it's going to last for. "They will stay here until they've eaten everything. "But if the octopus go, the crab isn't going to just appear out of thin air. "We won't have a great deal to catch." Read more from Sky News:Trooping the Colour - see best pics The Marine Biological Association is studying factors that could underpin the surge in octopus numbers. The sea around the UK is around 2C warmer than normal. But in the southwest of England the temperature is 3C or even 4C above average for the time of year. Dr Thomas said warmer waters increase survival of young octopus fry over winter, and a change to ocean currents could bring them more food. 'The ocean is changing' Overfishing of species that would normally eat young octopuses may also mean more are surviving to adulthood. "There is no doubt that the ocean is changing," he said. "Fishermen are like the canaries in the coal mine, the first to see things changing out at sea." Scientists say protecting key parts of the ocean as marine nature reserves would serve as a buffer against pressures from human activity elsewhere. So far, 50 nations plus the EU have ratified the United Nations High Seas Treaty that commits countries to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. Another nine need to ratify it for it to become operational. The UK government has said it will ratify the treaty by the end of the year.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Scientists create world's tiniest violin —and it's only visible with a microscope
British physicists claim they've created the 'world's smallest violin' — and, by the looks of it, they could take a bow for their masterpiece invention. The brainy bunch at Loughborough University used nanotechnology to build the teeny instrument, which is no bigger than a speck of dust and can only be seen with a microscope. Made of platinum, the mini-instrument measures 35 microns, one-millionth of a meter long, and 13 microns wide. Loughborough explained on its website that it's tiny enough to fit within the width of a human's hair. The scientists created the violin, which is just a microscopic image and isn't playable, as a test of the school's new nanolithography system, which allows them to build and study structures at the nanoscale. The project references the expression 'Can you hear the world's smallest violin playing just for you?' which pokes fun at people being overly dramatic. 'Though creating the world's smallest violin may seem like fun and games, a lot of what we've learned in the process has actually laid the groundwork for the research we're now undertaking,' Kelly Morrison, professor of experimental physics at the university, said on its website. 'Our nanolithography system allows us to design experiments that probe materials in different ways – using light, magnetism, or electricity – and observe their responses. Once we understand how materials behave, we can start applying that knowledge to develop new technologies.' The violin was made by a NanoFrazor, a nano-sculpting machine that uses a technique where a heated, needle-like tip writes patterns. First, a chip was coated with a gel-like material and then placed under the machine, effectively burning the violin pattern into the surface. After the pattern was etched, the underlayer of the gel dissolved, and a violin-shaped hole remained. A thin layer of platinum was then inserted into the chip, which was then rinsed with acetone to remove any remaining particles. The prototype took three hours to create. However, the team's final version took several months. 'Depending on how you engage with technology, there are people who are always looking to have something that runs faster, better, more efficient,' Morrison said in a YouTube video. 'That requires … finding a way to scale down.'
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
'What a waste:' US scientists decry Trump's 47% cuts to NASA science budget
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Since January, when President Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House has been asking U.S. government organizations to implement some pretty radical changes. Things have been tense, to say the least. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off with little explanation, programs that improve diversity in the workplace have been eliminated, research grants have been cancelled in large sweeps, and international college students find themselves at risk of losing their legal status. One government organization that could be hit the hardest is NASA. The agency has faced a particularly extensive amount of pressure from the Trump administration: surveillance, goal restructuring, website purging and more. Other federal science organizations haven't been spared, either — places like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have been targeted as well. The ground of U.S. science seems to be quaking for political reasons rather than scientific ones, leaving scientists disheartened by their government and anxious about what's next. "I don't think it is an overstatement to say that morale among U.S.-based scientists is at an all-time low," Sarah Horst, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, told "People are afraid for their jobs, their students, the projects they've often spent decades working on, and they are afraid for the future of the United States." And things only got worse on May 30, when the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA came out. It proposes cutting the agency's science funding by 47%, and the agency's workforce by about one-third — from 17,391 to 11,853. This budget has to be officially passed by Congress to take effect, but if it indeed does, the effects could be brutal. "That would represent the smallest NASA workforce since mid-1960, before the first American had launched into space," Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration and advocacy organization, told "If this budget is made real, I am most concerned about people," John O'Meara, chief scientist at the Keck Observatory, told "Missions deliver data and are essential, but the data is meaningless without the people there to interpret it, test theories and share discoveries with the world." Perhaps the most striking aspect of the White House's 2026 NASA budget proposal is the sheer amount of missions it would cancel altogether: 41 projects, as the Planetary Society said in a statement denouncing the report. "This is the extinction-level event we were warning people about," Dreier said. Some specifics: The sharply reduced budget would cancel the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which was meant to bring samples of the Red Planet's surface to Earth — samples that NASA's Perseverance rover has been dutifully collecting over the last few years, and which scientists have long stressed must be analyzed in a lab to reach their full potential. MSR has experienced its own share of complications since its genesis, to be fair, including a huge price tag and what some believe is an overcomplicated mechanism of sample retrieval. However, cancelling the project outright instead of coming up with a solution would waste much of Perseverance's work on the Red Planet. The OSIRIS-APEX mission (you may remember it by its previous moniker, OSIRIS-REx) would also be cut off. This mission successfully sent a spacecraft on a multi-billion-mile expedition to an asteroid named Bennu, then had it grab a few pieces of the asteroid before traveling all the way back to Earth and safely dropping the samples to the ground. This same probe is now on round two, headed to examine the infamous asteroid Apophis — but if the FY26 NASA budget is confirmed, it won't complete its trip. "I'm personally mostly concerned for in-flight missions that already have a significant investment in both taxpayer dollars and peoples' lives/careers (including my own)," Kevin McGill, an employee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the agency's lead center for robotic planetary exploration, told "Luckily, my work on [the Curiosity Mars rover] and Mars2020 [Perseverance] are mostly safe, but a lot of other stuff isn't." The budget also suggests ceasing operations for the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft, which has been circling our solar system's gas giant since 2016 while regularly delivering rich information about the world and its moons. Juno is responsible for all those swirly blue images of Jupiter the astronomy community holds high; it took five years for this spacecraft to get to where it is, and many more for it to be built in the first place. "The operating missions cancellations alone represent over $12 billion of invested taxpayer value — and once they're gone, they're gone. It would take years and many millions more to replace them," Dreier said. NASA would also need to pull out of its collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Rosalind Franklin rover — for the second time, no less — which is a robotic life-hunting explorer set to launch toward Mars in 2028. NASA had to pull out in 2012 because of budget cuts as well but re-entered the rover program after ESA cut ties with its other partner, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, once Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. "This makes the U.S. an untrustworthy partner and our allies hesitate the next time we ask them for help," Dreier said. Two operational Mars orbiters — Mars Odyssey and MAVEN — would be cancelled as well, as would the New Horizons spacecraft currently studying the outer reaches of the solar system and the DaVinci and VERITAS missions, which would explore Venus. The Lunar Gateway, which NASA envisioned as a sort of International Space Station around the moon, would also be cancelled. "What was surprising was the level of cuts within parts of each of the agencies. An example is astrophysics, where the cut was nearly 2/3 of the astrophysics budget," O'Meara said. According to the Planetary Society's analysis of the budget, that huge astrophysics reduction could mean eight spacecraft dedicated to studying extreme events in the universe (think, the Chandra X-ray Observatory) would be terminated. This analysis also suggests 10 missions constructed to study the region around Earth and the sun would be cancelled, as well as about a dozen Earth-specific missions that help scientists forecast natural disasters such as hurricanes and track global warming. The latter is especially concerning, given the speed with which Earth is heating up due to human activities that lead to greenhouse gas emissions — activities the Trump administration favors, such as burning coal for cheap power. Per the budget proposal, the White House also wants NASA to eliminate its "green aviation" spending, dedicated to making airplanes better for the environment, and instead work on "protecting the development of technologies with air traffic control and defense applications." It is also worth considering that other Trump-mandated moves have heavily impacted climate initiatives as well: more than 800 NOAA workers were laid off, for example, and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which houses climate change records dating back to the 1800s, was closed down — leading members of NASA's largest union to speak out in solidarity with their coworkers. Hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, a huge report that details the dangers of climate change for policymakers to lean on, were also dismissed. (That represented all of the authors of this report). "This budget request, and its implications, has been highly disruptive to the entire field," O'Meara said. "We are forced to focus on 'what-if' planning that changes in scope rapidly. That takes the time away from what we do best: doing science and sharing it with the world." Furthermore, the White House's FY26 NASA budget proposal centers around a shift toward human missions to the Red Planet; this was a rare area that saw a budget boost in the President's request. For example, one slide in the budget summary says NASA should invest "more than $1 billion in new technology investments to enable a crewed mission to Mars." Another says the agency should allocate "$200M for Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) to start launching robotic precursor missions to the Martian surface, and $80M to start deploying communications relay capabilities for Mars." "It just bothers me that they are changing almost the entirety of NASA's mission to this pipe dream of a human mission to Mars in any reasonable time frame and cost," McGill said. reached out to NASA for comment on the possible impact of these budget cuts, and was directed to acting administrator Janet Petro's statement in the proposal's Technical Supplement. This statement is supportive of the budget request overall, mentioning items such as a renewed push for human spaceflight to the moon and Mars. "The President's Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for NASA reflects the Trump-Vance Administration's commitment to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility. With this budget, we aim to shape a Golden Age of innovation and exploration," it reads. This shift toward Mars crewed missions is perhaps predictable, given Trump's affiliation with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. (Former affiliation, maybe, given the heated feud currently unfolding on social media between the two.) Musk was a prominent backer of Trump's campaign and worked very closely with him over the past four months. For example, the SpaceX chief ran the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was responsible for the bulk of government funding cuts in the name of saving "wasted taxpayer money." Independently, Musk has earned a reputation as maybe the most outspoken advocate of settling Mars, even going so far as to say he wishes to "die on Mars." SpaceX, as well as its fans, are extremely focused on achieving that goal. "In isolation, a serious humans to Mars campaign should be exciting — Mars exploration is a worthy goal, and The Planetary Society has advocated for that for years," Dreier said. "But the cost here is too high." Another concern Dreier has is that the White House expects to achieve this major goal while simultaneously reducing NASA's workforce at an unprecedented rate. "This isn't just poor policy," he added. "It's fundamentally wasteful and inefficient, exactly what this administration is saying it does not want." And the layoffs could be even more far-reaching than anticipated. McGill says morale at JPL had already been very low after sweeping layoffs took place last year, but also that the energy was further damaged by the agency's recent return-to-office order. For context, nearly 5,500 JPL employees who have been working remotely since the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic were told they must return to in-person work. The deadlines for that return were Aug. 25 for general employees within California and Oct. 27 for teleworkers living outside the state. "Employees who do not return by their required date will be considered to have resigned," JPL officials said in a workforce-wide email that was obtained by "It's clear that it's a silent layoff of the over 1,000 remote employees who they don't want to pay severance to," a NASA employee at JPL not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency previously told McGill says the order "threatens to decimate the workforce and a lot of critical institutional knowledge." "I love JPL and its mission, but it's been a rough time as of late," he said. According to Dreier, there's good news and bad news concerning whether the budget proposal will go through. The good news is that, as he explains, there seems to be bipartisan dislike for the proposal. "We've heard directly from multiple congressional offices — Republican and Democrat — that this budget is 'dead on arrival,'" he said. Of note, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation released his legislative directives for Senate Republicans' budget reconciliation bill on Friday (June 6). The senator proposes dedicating $10 billion more to NASA's science programs — and, though most of it is indeed in line with the FY26 budget request's Mars endeavors, some of that funding would be used for other things, like NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket meant for moon exploration and Lunar Gateway. This united aversion to the budget proposal is unsurprising. The bipartisan U.S. Planetary Science Caucus, for instance, previously released a statement in response to early blueprints of the proposal that suggested the huge cuts we're seeing presented now. "We are extremely alarmed by reports of a preliminary White House budget that proposes cutting NASA Science funding by almost half and terminating dozens of programs already well underway, like the Mars Sample Return mission and the Roman Space Telescope," co-chairs Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) wrote. Such agreement across the aisle makes sense when we consider how long it takes for space missions to reach fruition. Collaboration isn't just key — it's unavoidable. "Spaceflight, and human spaceflight in particular, requires hand-off from one administration to another," Dreier said. "The timelines are just too long for any one presidential administration." The bad news, however, is the White House may have a workaround. Related Stories: — 'This is an attack on NASA.' Space agency's largest union speaks out as DOGE cuts shutter science institute located above 'Seinfeld' diner in NYC — Saving Gateway, SLS and Orion? Sen. Ted Cruz proposes $10 billion more for NASA's moon and Mars efforts — 'Their loss diminishes us all': Scientists emphasize how Trump's mass NOAA layoffs endanger the world "Even if Congress ultimately rejects this budget, the slow pace of legislation and gridlock we've seen in recent years make it unlikely that appropriations will be in place by October 1st of this year," Dreier said. "If there's another continuing resolution, the White House budget office will throttle spending to match the lowest of all possible budget scenarios: theirs. So, we face the possibility of these cuts going into effect by default. Given the breadth and depth of these cuts, that could be very hard to recover from." "This budget proposal threatens to tear down that carefully constructed coalition in favor of a narrow vision that lacks the political durability necessary for long-term success," he added. "What a waste."
