Location: Warmwater Aquaculture Research Unit
Project Number: 0500-00031-001-009-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2025
End Date: Aug 31, 2028
Objective:
Cooperator will conduct research to protect farm-raised catfish and other aquatic food products from contamination with pathogens, toxins, chemicals, allergens, and biologics. In addition, conduct research to enhance manufacturing efficiency, meat and protein yield, food quality, storage stability and product innovations for expanding markets and increasing profitability of the aquatic food industry.
Approach:
Cooperator will focus on developing practical solutions to eliminating contaminants in farm-raised catfish and other aquatic food products, creating new markets and products for farm-raised catfish and other aquatic products. Approaches will include research to 1) Detect, characterize and control/eliminate pathogens, toxins, allergens, chemical residues, and biologics in raw and cooked catfish and other aquatic food materials using microbiological, physico-chemical, enzymatic, instrumental, immunological and modern whole genome sequencing methods and 2) Develop methods to increase meat yield, reduce processing waste, and produce new food products and functional ingredients with high food quality characteristics to increase profits for producers/processors of catfish and other aquatic food materials.