What is bioproduction?

Bioproduction is a research field which covers the whole process of that living organisms produce various types of products, such as materials for food, pharmaceutical products, biofuels, biological tools, bio-plastics. Extraction and purification processes are needed in certain types of products, while the living organisms themselves are often used as they are. Breeding and production process management are the key points in the research field.

Why bioproduction is important for us?

The bioproducts mentioned above are made from low cost materials, such as light, CO2, inorganic salts, starch, and feed crops. Certain products can be produced by bioproduction with far lower cost than by chemical synthesis. Not only cost effective, bioproduction is regarded as environment friendly and more sustainable. Here we propose research strategies to promote the bioproduction research, particularly to build up the guiding principle for effective breeding and production process management in a systematic way. As the research background, current issues and relevant industries vary among the types of organisms used, our proposals are divided into three parts. The first one argues the bioproduction by microorganisms and cultured cells, the second is for fishery and animal husbandry, and the third part refers to agriculture (mainly plants).

Background and present state

In our long history, humans have benefitted from aquaculture and livestock. In the light of recent environmental pollution and decreasing natural fish stocks, the liability for these industries have been increasingly intensified. Research and technological development are expected to contribute for the improvement of sustainability, quality, and economic efficiency in aquaculture and animal husbandry. From the aspect of breeding, larger, fast growing, highly feed efficient, and disease/parasites tolerant/resistant varieties have to be established, to meet these goals. Research in production management could contribute to develop environmentally friendly, highly efficient feeding stuff and management methodology to bring higher quality and lower mortality. Such research and development have to be done with using actual farm animals/fishes, not only on model organisms like mice and zebra fishes.

Current Issues

In general, above mentioned farm animals/fishes have longer life cycle than model organisms commonly used in labs, meaning longer time is required to establish a new variety by breeding, as generation turn over takes longer duration. In addition, these animals require more space to rear and higher cost of feeding, resulting in increasing the difficulties to conduct research on real farm animals/fishes.

Proposed research strategy

To meet the immediate demand to advance the breeding and production process management, here we propose following two research strategies.

Theme 1: To accelerate the breeding speed and efficiency in real farm animals/fishes

• (1) To advance reproduction related technologies, such as surrogate parent, in vitro culture of gametes, techniques for preserving gametes and fertilised eggs, aiming to shorten breeding time in farm animals/fishes.
• (2) To advance the breeding methodology by applying genomic information and uncovering the genomic/molecular mechanisms underlying desired traits. Such effort would promote the development of advanced methods for the prediction of traits based on genomic information.

Theme 2: Research and development on state-of-the-art technology in production process management

• (1) Development of cost effective and environmentally friendly feeding stuff. It is important to minimise the left-over feeding stuff in aquaculture to prevent water pollution.
• (2) Promotion of basic and applied research on mechanisms that affect animal behaviour to develop technologies that enable effective control on farm animals/fishes. For example, uncovering the mechanisms that stimulate eating behaviour might contribute to improve feeding efficiency and to shorten the culturing duration. It is inevitably important to develop applicable technologies to real farm animals/fishes, in an industrial scale.
• (3) To develop efficient feeding technology by taking advantages from nutritional programming. This technology takes advantage from the naturally existing metabolic plasticity which has narrow opening window and could affect the metabolic characteristics of whole life of animals. The technology could open a new door to establish sustainable and environmentally friendly feeding methodology.

The above-mentioned research strategy could be only effective when a proper translational research system is implemented. Appropriate model organisms have to be set to conduct any research activities, with enhancing the accumulated knowledge based on model organisms in experimental labs.

With the considerably longer life cycle and larger rearing space and high cost feeding stuff required, at this moment, it is getting more and more difficult to conduct the truly translational research by each single laboratory. To conquer these difficulties, we would strongly recommend to establish an integrative research centre for basic and translational research, where rearing and culturing facility for livestock/fishes, various analytical instruments are provided for the research community. In order to maintain such integrative research centre in an economically sustainable way, it is crucial to actively apply the research outcomes onto the commercial production and to pass-on the profit from the industry to research activity.

Such an integrative translational research hub could also promote the communication between various types of stakeholders who are related to basic research, commercial production including food processing, marketing, and intellectual properties. Such communication would facilitate to build up a strong foundation of aquaculture and livestock research and development.