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Genetically Engineered Seafood Coming To a Restaurant Near You (indianapublicmedia.org)
"The first genetically-modified animal for human consumption could be arriving in grocery stores across the United States as early as next year." Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath tipped us off to Indiana Public Media's report on AquaBounty Technologies:
AquaBounty will produce a GMO salmon that CEO Ron Stotish says will grow faster than freshwater-raised fish. "It does so because we've given it the ability, using the same biological process that regulates growth in the unmodified salmon, to grow about twice as fast reaching market rate about half the time," Stotish says. The technology has been around since the 1990s, but it took until 2015 to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, due to concerns about people eating genetically-modified animals. The genetic makeup of the biotech fish takes a growth-hormone regulatory gene from the Pacific Chinook salmon with a promoter gene from an ocean pout and puts it into the genome of an Atlantic salmon. The result causes for the growth hormone to remain on leading to faster growth rate than non GMO salmon.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.
"Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies has developed a biotech salmon that it plans to grow near no major body of water, in a production facility in the small town of Albany, Indiana. The company producing the breed of high-tech fish hopes to change the aquaculture industry."
Not seafood.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
All the fools speaking against GMO have no idea where the real issues are. The objection to gmo in plants has been about increased use of pesticide, namely Roundup, which IS a concern. But the actual GMO is not the real issue other than Gene transfer to weeds, which is happening. But corn made drought-resistant is useful. Or plants made to resist certain pests by transferring genes from other edible plants(iow, we already eat that protein) ARE useful. Now, we are looking at seafood that is being destroyed in the oceans and now we have the ability to farm these economically and stop depleting our salmon. Ideally, we would do the same for tuna, and soon. This would also allow us to stop the massive commercial fishing going on by other nations, who are depleting these fish.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They don't dye the flesh. That's one of the myths listed in the first article I linked -- tl;dr: farmed salmon is fed with the same caroteniods that wild salmon gets from crustaceans.
Personally, I can't taste the difference between farmed and wild, nor frozen or fresh. But uncontrolled anecdotes are next to useless.