2.1. Experimental animals and study design
Atlantic salmon (S. salar) hatching on 31 October 2018 were reared at 5.5°C by Stofnfiskur Ltd. (Iceland). Eyed eggs were transferred to Laxar ehf. (Iceland) where they were raised to first feeding using standard commercial techniques and commercial start-feed diet BioMar Inicio-plus (United Kingdom) of 0.5mm pellet size. Fry were transferred to Matís Aquaculture Research Station (MARS) on 23 January 2019, where they were acclimated for one week to the study facilities. All fish within the experiment were individually weighed following a 12-hour fasting period under anaesthetic (2-phenoxyethanol of 300ppm). All fish were very close in weight at the beginning of the feeding trial (1.14 ± 0.1g). Fish were split into eighteen 20L-white circular PVC tanks, in triplicate for each feed treatment. Each tank contained 20 individual fish. Fish were kept in freshwater at 9.5 ± 0.5°C under 24-hour photoperiod of 20 ± 4 lux, oxygen levels were maintained above 80% saturation. Fish were fed with the experimental feed treatments for 35 days continuously. The experiment was performed following European and Icelandic guidelines and within the permits and licences of the MARS facility as described in the Declarations of this manuscript.
2.2. Production of torula yeast
Dried, inactive torula yeast (C.jadinii) was cultivated by RISE Processum (loc) on wood hydrolysates provided by Arbiom Inc. (Durham, NC, USA). Briefly, wood hydrolysates were generated from hardwood chips (mixed species) locally sourced from Virginia, USA. Subsequently, the hydrolysates were fermented in a 50-L reactor under continuous operation followed by washing, thermal inactivation, and drying to produce the final product.
2.3. Experimental feed treatments and feeding
There were two basal diets formulated for this investigation. In the first basal diet group there were three treatments with a marine protein base, providing a simplified replacement where fish meal (FM) was increasingly replaced with torula yeast with inclusion levels 0% (FM00), 10% (FM10), and 20% (FM20) (Table 1). In the second basal diet group there were three treatments with a marine protein and plant protein combination base, providing a commercially relevant replacement, where a plant protein mixture (MIX) was increasingly replaced with torula yeast with inclusion levels 0% (MIX00), 10% (MIX10), and 20% (MIX20) (Table 2). The chemical composition of all protein sources used in feeds for this experiment from both FM and MIX basal diets are presented (Table 3). The feed treatments were produced by cold pelleting at Matís ohf. (Iceland), with a pasta machine (ADE, Germany). All dry ingredients were milled to bring all materials to equal particle size (IPHARMACHINE, Germany). Dry ingredients were then homogenised in a standard food mixer (KitchenAid, USA) and the mix was put back through the same mill to improve the homogeneity of the feed. The dry mix was returned to the food mixer and fish oil was added while simultaneously mixing, a small volume of water was added to produce the ideal consistency for the next stage (200ml). The mix was then processed in the pasta machine to produce 0.5mm pellets. These pellets were dried in a commercial food dryer (Kreuzmayr, Austria) to <10% moisture content. Resulting feed treatments were analysed for chemical composition (Table 1 FM, Table 2 MIX). During the 35-day feeding trial, tanks were fed 5 times per day by electric belt-feeder between the hours of 08:00 to 20:00. All tanks were fed identical volumes, with 15% excess based on feed requirements at this developmental stage.
2.4. Growth Performance
After 35 days of continuous feeding all individual fish from all FM and MIX tanks were weighed (wet weight (g)) and measured (total length (cm) following a 12-hour fast. From this data the Fulton´s Condition Factor (K) and Specific Growth Rate (%) (SGR) over the study period could be calculated: K = (Weight/Total Length3) × 100 and SGR = ((Ln(Final Weight)-Ln(Initial Weight)) × 100)/t, where is the number of days over which the trial was run. Mortality was monitored daily throughout the feeding trial.
2.5. Gut Sampling
After the growth performance assessment, all fish were left for one week to recover from handling and fed with the respective FM and MIX feed treatments. At the end of this week fish were fasted for 12hours and then randomly sampled, three (3) fish from each tank, nine (9) fish per feed treatment for FM and MIX diets respectively. Sampled fish were euthanised with a lethal dose of anaesthetic (phenoxyethanol) 600ppm and the outside of the fish was rinsed in 90% ethanol followed by sterile distilled water. The gastro-intestinal tract from the top of the mid-gut, just below the pyloric caeca down to the end of the distal gut was directly removed under sterile conditions, with any content present included. Samples were then stored at -80°C prior to downstream processing.
2.6. DNA extraction, PCR amplification and sequencing
Gut samples were individually homogenised manually using a sterile petri dish with a sterile scalpel to break up the gut sample. Samples were transferred to a sterile 2ml Eppendorf tube with 300µl of sterile 1mm diameter sterile silica beads (BioSpec Products, United States). 800µl of CD1 solution from the QIAamp PowerFecal Pro DNA kit (QIAGEN, Germany) was added to the Eppendorf tube. Samples were vortexed for 5 seconds and shaken at maximum speed (30Hz) in a laboratory mixer mill (Retsch MM400) for 1 minute. The supernatant (~800µl) was transferred to the PowerBead Pro Tube from the QIAGEN QIAamp PowerFecal Pro DNA kit. The protocol for this DNA extraction kit was then followed and finally DNA was eluted with 80µl of C6 solution. An empty sample with no material was also run to ensure no contamination occurred during the DNA extraction protocol. DNA concentration was measured using 2µl of sample in the Invitrogen Qubit dsDNA BR Assay kit (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA) which measure samples with DNA concentration from 2-1000ng. DNA were diluted to 4ng/µl in a 50µl aliquot. Samples were then subjected to PCR of a region covering V3-V4 regions of the 16S rRNA gene with a universal bacterial primer pair S-D-Bact-0341-b-S-17 (5′−CCTACGGGNGGCWGCAG-3′)/S-D-Bact-0785-a-A-21(5′-GACT- ACHVGGGTATCTAATCC-3′) (42). The PCR master mix included the diluted DNA, nuclease-free water, Q5 High-Fidelity DNA polymerase (New England Biolabs, Ipswich, USA), Q5 GC Enhancer, 0.5µM of each primer containing Illumina overhang adapters, and 1x Q5 Reaction buffer, 200µM dNTPs (New England Biolabs, Ipswich, USA). Included in the PCR were both positive and negative samples to monitor for successful amplification and absence of contamination of the target region only. The thermocycling protocol had an initial denaturation step (98°C for 30s), then 35 cycles of, denaturation (98°C for 10s), annealing (52°C for 30s), and extension (72°C for 30s), with a final extension (72°C for 2min). Libraries were multiplexed with Nextera XT v2 barcodes (Illumina, USA), normalised using Sequel-Prep Normalisation Plates (ThermoFisher Scientific, USA) then sequenced on a MiSeq desktop sequencer (Illumina, USA) using v3 chemistry and 2 × 300 cycles.
2.7. Statistical Methods
2.7.1. Growth performance
Statistical analyses were performed in R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05). All tests were two-tailed with a significance level set to α = 0.05. FM diet and MIX diets were considered separately since they were formulated independently but identical statistical designs were used.
For growth performance, two dependent variables were statistically assessed, Condition Factor (K) and Specific Growth Rate (SGR (%)). A Generalised Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) model was assessed first with the package lme4 (43), where Feed Treatment was considered a fixed factor and Tank replicate was considered a random nested factor of Feed Treatment. For both FM and MIX diets the Tank replicate did not have a significant effect. Therefore, a Generalised Linear Model (GLM) with the package nlme (44) was selected where for FM and MIX diets respectively Feed Treatment was a fixed factor and tank effect was not significant. Tukey post-hoc testing was applied to results with significant output.
2.7.2. Gut microbiome
Demultiplexed FASTQ files from Illumina were processed to produce Amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) using the DADA2 package version 1.16.0 (45) in Rstudio version 4.0.2 (46). The filterAndTrim variables used were truncLen=c(280,250), trimLeft= 21, maxN=0, maxEE=c(2,2), truncQ=2 and the learnError function was performed on a subset of 105888913 reads. The SILVA database version 138 was used to assignTaxonomy to the ASVs (47). The microbial community was analysed using R packages phyloseq (48), microbiome (49) and vegan (50), and visualised with ggplot2 (51). The number of reads output from the DADA2 pipeline were 15449.44 ± 3575.3 for fish meal-based diets and 13317.48 ± 3341.2 for mix meal-based diets. PCR and DNA negative control samples were included in the sequencing and dada2 pipeline to check for potential contamination of samples, there was no detectable contamination in these control samples. For comparison the read depth was normalised across samples with the function rarefy_even_depth to the sample with the lowest read depth. ASVs from the Kingdom Eukaryota, Order Chroloplast and Family Mitochondria were removed from downstream analysis as they are often remnants from 16S fragments in Eukaryotes and do not belong to the bacteria. Raw 16S rRNA gene amplicon reads are deposited in the Sequence Read Archive under BioProject PRJNA732903.
The microbiome community for MIX and FM basal diets were quantitatively analysed using alpha and beta diversity measures. The selected alpha diversity measures where the observed richness of AVSs, Shannon diversity, Chao1 diversity and Pielou´s Evenness. A General Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) was used to assess if there was a significant difference in these alpha diversity measures between the different Feed Treatments from the FM and MIX diets respectively. In this model Feed Treatment was a fixed factor and Tank was a nested random factor of feed treatment. The random nested factor of Tank was tested by a Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) (52). Post-hoc testing was carried out using Tukey test. The microbiome community assemblage for each of the feed treatment types were transformed using a Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrix and non-metric multidimensional scaling was applied. An Analysis of similarity (ANOSIM) test was applied to assess for significant difference between and within fish fed different Feed Treatments in the fish meal-based feed and the mix-meal based feeds respectively. To further investigate the microbiome community assemblage the relative abundance as a proportion was visualised at the phylum level in stacked bar plots for direct comparison. The genus level was then visualised, with all genera present at less than 1% abundance amalgamated into a category called other and the genera present at greater than 1% abundance were visually displayed using boxplots for each feed treatment in the fish meal-based and mix-meal based treatments respectively.