Production of recombinant hormones and growth factors for use in aquaculture

Abstract

Progress in recombinant DNA technology and development of new expression systems has provided valuable means to produce large quantities of hormones and growth factors from various fish species that otherwise required sacrifice of enormous numbers of fish to obtain only small amounts of the native protein. The motivation to produce recombinant hormones and growth factors for application to fish culture can be attributed to (a) the low amounts of pep- tides in producing tissues available for purifica- tion and characterization by classical methods, i.e., follicle stimulating hormone (FSH = GtH-I) in the pituitary or insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) and IGF-II in the liver, (b) the similarity in chemical structure between two hormones that does not permit efficient separation (FSH and LH = GtH-II), (c) the need for large quanti- ties of hormones for growth enhancement by growth hormone (GH), and (d) interest in studying structure/function relationships, i.e., single or multiple amino acid deletion, amino acid substitution, etc.