Metabolomic Response to High Temperature Stress in Murrel Channa striatus and Insights for Designer Feeds

Aquaculture is among the most important food production sectors and plays an extremely important role in ensuring food and nutritional security across the globe. However, climate change and resulting global warming is posing challenges for the aquaculture sector. Fish growth, reproductive capability, resistance to diseases and health in general would be severely affected by high temperature. In order to ensure sustainable growth of the sector, it is necessary to look for ameliorative strategies. The feed based approach is among the most viable ameliorative strategies. However, the development of medicated feeds has been mostly done through heat and trial method making it a time consuming process. Inversely, the development of metabolomics has opened door for a new approach in which metabolic responses of an organism under a particular stress could be studied and depending upon the physiological requirement, specific ingredients could be incorporated in the diet for preparation of designer feeds. The present chapter describes how the metabolomic responses of murrel Channa striatus could be utilized for preparation of designer feeds for ameliorating heat stress. Although heat stress has been used as a case study, the scope of the approach could be extended to other stressors also.