Dietary ALA, But not LNA, Increase Growth, Reduce Inflammatory Processes, and Increase Anti-Oxidant Capacity in the Marine Finfish Larimichthys crocea

Whilst aquaculture feed is increasingly formulated with the inclusion of plant oils replacing fish oil, and increasing research effort has been invested in understanding the metabolic effects of reduced dietary n-3 long chain poly unsaturated fatty acids (n-3 LC-PUFA), relatively little information is available on the potential direct metabolic roles of dietary alpha-linolenic acid (ALA, 18:3n-3) and alpha-linolenic acid/linoleic acid (LNA, 18:2n-6) ratio in cultured marine finfish species. In this study, four plant oil based diets, with varying ALA/LNA ratio (0.0, 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5) were fed to juvenile large yellow croakers (Larimichthys crocea) and compared to a fish oil-based control diet (CD) to evaluate the resulting effects on growth, nonspecific immunity, anti-oxidant capacity and related gene expression. High dietary LNA negatively impacted fish growth performance, nonspecific immunity and antioxidant capacity, but growth and immunity were maintained to levels comparable to CD by increasing the ratio of dietary ALA/LNA. The over-expression of genes associated with inflammation (cyclooxygenase-2 and interleukin-1 beta) and fatty acid oxidation (carnitine palmitoyl transferase I and acyl CoA oxidase) in croakers fed high concentrations of LNA were reduced to levels comparable to those fed CD by increasing dietary ALA/LNA. This study showed that dietary ALA, by increasing the overall n-3/n-6 PUFA ratio, exerts direct anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects, similar to those exerted by dietary n-3 LC-PUFA.