5. Dr. Amir Bitan

An artificial fish intestine (Fish-AI) composed of a scaffold mimicking the Rainbow trout (RT) intestinal villi lined with epithelial cells is currently being developed as part of the H2020-FETOPEN project initiative Fish-AI. The aim is to develop a screening platform based on RT intestinal cells to test the applicability of novel feeds for aquaculture. Towards this aim, we performed in vitro digestion (IVD) of fish feed in order to expose the feed to the gastric and intestinal digestive conditions, using either RT stomach or intestinal enzyme extracts. This will allow the introduction of partially digested feed to the Fish-AI to better simulate the conditions in the intestine of RT. On-the-bench analysis allows us to assess that proteolysis occurred during the IVD, and metabolomic analysis permits us to assess the nutrients profile in the IVD feed as compared to digested feed that was sampled from the intestine of RT fed the same diet. We demonstrated that the IVD feed produced by this method can be introduced to cultured enterocytes with no significant cytotoxic effect on the metabolic status, cell plasma membrane integrity, lysosomal integrity and cell barrier integrity. The predictive power of the Fish-AI is presently being tested in vivo, in RT.