Bioactive Octopus peptides with potential for aquaculture

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.