Examining the dietary effect of insect meals on the innate immune response of fish: A meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• A meta-analysis was performed to investigate the effects of insect meal replacement on fish innate immunity. • 40 % of insect meal replacement resulted in the highest upregulated immune response in fish. • 87.5–100 % of insect meal replacement was found to significantly decrease the immune gene expression level in fish. Insect meal inclusion in aquaculture feed has received increased interest as a sustainable alternative to fishmeal and recent evidence has shown additional effects on modulating the immune response. However, lack of effects of insect meal on fish immunity in a few studies have put these beneficial effects into question. The objective of this meta-analysis was to summarize the effects of fishmeal replacement with insect meal on the innate immune response of several fish species based on differential gene expression via qPCR. A systematic literature search was conducted using online databases including Web of Science and ScienceDirect that found 197 studies as of August 2023, however only 20 studies met the criteria of high-quality studies focused on the immune response of fish and were included in this meta-analysis. The most studied insect meal was from black soldier fly, followed by yellow mealworm, and the most commonly analyzed tissue was the liver, followed by the intestine. The effect of fishmeal replacement with insect meal on fish immune responses were examined using a mixed model, with study as the random effect. This meta-analysis found a non-linear (quadratic) relationship ( P = 0.017) between immune gene expression fold change and the level of fishmeal replacement with insect meal. Based on the fitted quadratic curve, a 40 % replacement of fishmeal with insect meal resulted in the highest upregulated immune response in fish. Fish taxonomic family was also found to have an effect ( P = 0.004) on immune gene expression, where the taxonomic family Moronidae was more affected, with an average fold change of 2.783 (± 0.325). Other variables examined, including the insect type, tissue analyzed, dietary crude protein level, did not affect the immune response ( P > 0.05). This meta-analysis also found that dietary lipid had a significant correlation with immune gene expression, and should be taken into consideration in future studies and meta-analyses. These findings are impactful since they provide evidence for the optimal dietary replacement level of insect meals required to significantly affect the innate immune response across several fish species.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.062 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".