Fishing plays an important role in Japan’s economy and food supply, but overfishing and climate change have caused wild populations of many popular fish to plummet.
Farm-raised fish can fill in for the wild-caught kind, but Japan’s aquaculture industry has been on the decline, as aging fishers retire and younger people choose to look elsewhere for work.
Making aquaculture more lucrative could save the industry, and one way to do that is to make it more productive, growing more food with less feed. Right now, 60% to 70% of fish farmers’ costs goes toward feed, according to Japan’s Fisheries Agency.
So Japanese scientists used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to alter a type of fish — the red seabream — to grow up to 60% more edible muscle from the same amount of feed.
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On September 17, a Japanese health ministry panel ruled that, because the researchers didn’t add any new genes to the fish — they just knocked one out — it didn’t need to undergo the extensive safety screening required for genetically modified foods.
That same day, Japanese startup Regional Fish said it was accepting orders for the gene-edited fish through the crowdfunding platform Campfire.
