Aquaculture nutrition is one of the most expensive component of production costs. These costs are directly related to the cost of purchasing Aquafeeds and feed amounts consumed, but also indirectly to costs such as slow growth, mortalities due to malnutrition and low quality of the final product.

Fish feeds should be developed to meet the nutritional need of the fish, during the whole growth cycle and under the specific conditions of production. Research on feed formulation and development is therefore a combination of satisfying the specific nutritional needs of farmed fish, the aquaculture production technology used and the sustainability of aquafeed ingredients and feeds.

The focus of this research direction is to investigate the nutritional needs of aquaculture fish through its various life stages with particular reference in the requirements of minerals, vitamins, essential amino and fatty acids under the evolving scientific, technological and business environments.

The group is also working on the development and testing of novel sustainable aquafeeds promoting the substitution of the finite marine resources with novel and processed conventional ingredients as well as functional micro - ingredients and dietary supplements.

The improvement of the nutritional value of sustainable ingredient sources through biotechnological processes and feed production methods is also part of the research directions of the group. Furthermore, IMBBC supports the development of feeds for new species in farming, evaluates commercial feeds and shares knowledge with the aquaculture and aquafeed industry.

The nutrition team is currently developing new advanced approaches of nutritional evaluation of nutrients, ingredients and feeds using -omic technologies to study the feeding of aquaculture fish. “Omics” technologies provide a new tool to study the metabolism of the living organism at the level of genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites. These techniques provide new tools to understand the role and effects of nutrition in the growing aquaculture species.