BIOPTAL · Bioactive Octopus peptides with potential for aquaculture
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-09-01 → 2024-08-31
- EU contribution
- €160,932
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Bioactive Octopus peptides with potential for aquaculture
NOVEL PEPTIDES FROM OCTOPUS The aquaculture industry, vital for global protein supply, is increasingly threatened by microbial infections, worsened by high population densities in fish and shellfish farms. Traditionally, antibiotics have been used to combat these infections; however, around 90% of aquatic bacteria now exhibit resistance to at least one antibiotic, posing risks to both human health and the environment. To combat this challenge, the EU-funded BIOPTAL project aimed to identify natural alternatives by discovering bioactive peptides from underexplored sources – cephalopods, particularly the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris). Octopuses uniquely adapt to their environment through RNA editing, producing special peptides with potential antimicrobial properties. Using advanced proteomics and transcriptomics techniques, the researchers successfully identified antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) that could be effective against bacterial infections in aquaculture and other sectors. BIOPTAL employed a multidisciplinary approach, screening natural compounds from octopuses and achieving its goal of identifying candidate bioactive peptides for sustainable treatments. These findings could combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria in aquaculture, offering safer and more environmentally friendly alternatives to conventional antibiotics. Consequently, the BIOPTAL project contributes to the sustainability of aquaculture and the global effort to reduce antimicrobial resistance, ensuring a safer future for seafood production and human health.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Scientific community is increasingly paying attention to new efficient preventive and therapeutic approaches aimed to limit the spread of classical and emergent microbial infections in animal farming, namely aquaculture. To date, several synthetic antimicrobial agents have been used to control bacterial infections in shellfish and fish cultured worldwide. However, around 90% of the aquatic bacteria are resistant to at least one antibiotic which will represent a threat to human health in a near future. Marine species compose around half of the total global biodiversity and considering their special living environment (in close contact with microbes), composition and properties (e.g., antibacterial, antiviral, antitumoral), these organisms have gained substantial importance as a “gold mine” of new natural bioactive compounds such as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and toxins. Therefore, BIOPTAL “Bioactive Octopus peptides with potential to aquaculture” proposal will focus on high-throughput protein search from unparalleled and under-explored reservoirs of peptide diversity – cephalopods – and their putative targets, through a multidisciplinary research that contemplates in vivo experimental challenges as engines to assure a broad screening of natural compounds by accounting the fact that cephalopods evolve differently from almost every other organism. In fact, e.g., octopuses, routinely edit their RNA sequences to adapt to their environment. This means that some important peptides with antimicrobial or other relevant properties to several industries must only occur under particular conditions, that researchers do not assess without simulate that conditions at the lab. Thus, BIOPTAL will integrate challenges, in silico multi-omics analyses and in vitro tests in order to “biodiscovery” peptides as novel therapeutic solutions from common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) to fight the appearance and persistence of multidrug-resistant bacterial strains in the aquaculture sector.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA · MurciaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union