Review on Omics Approaches in Aquatic Animal Nutrition: Current Status, Limitations, and Perspectives.

Abstract

This review synthesizes the research progress in applying omics to aquatic animal nutrition, highlighting their advantages as well as current limitations, and outlines future directions for development. Traditional nutritional research is often hampered by environmental variability, low precision, and the complexity of nutrient interactions across different tissues. The advent of high-throughput sequencing, bioinformatics, and functional genomics has driven the rapid emergence of various omics fields, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics. These technologies overcome the limitations of traditional research methods, becoming powerful tools for investigating the regulatory mechanisms of nutrition in aquatic animals. Genomics and transcriptomics reveal genetic responses of aquatic animals to nutritional interventions, whereas proteomics and metabolomics enable large-scale analysis of proteins and metabolites, illuminating physiological changes under various nutritional conditions. Moreover, microbiomics provides crucial insights into the interactions between gut microbiota and host nutrient metabolism and immunity. Key applications such as gene editing and protein post-translational modification analysis further elucidate molecular mechanisms of nutritional regulation in fish. Despite significant advances, omics still faces persistent challenges, including technological complexity, ethical concerns, underdeveloped regulatory systems, ecological safety risks, and issues related to data storage and sharing. Addressing these through technological innovation, improved regulatory frameworks, and the expansion of application areas will be crucial for the sustainable advancement of omics in aquatic animal nutrition research.