Is dietary taurine supplementation beneficial for farmed fish and shrimp? a comprehensive review

Abstract

Taurine is a neutral β‐amino acid derived from the metabolism of sulphur‐containing amino acids. It is present in high concentrations in animal tissues, especially heart, retina, skeletal muscle, brain, large intestines, plasma, blood cells and leucocytes. Therefore, this amino acid plays significant roles in many physiological functions, including membrane stabilization, antioxidation, detoxification, modulation of immune response, calcium transport, myocardial contractility, retina development, bile acid metabolism, osmotic regulation and endocrine functions. Historically, taurine has not been considered as an essential nutrient for fish. However, recent studies have indicated that taurine synthesis widely differs between fish species and demonstrated that it plays a key role in aquaculture and nutrition of freshwater and marine fish and shrimp. Animal proteins are rich in taurine, whereas plant proteins are taurine‐deficient. Therefore, fish fed plant protein–based food may require exogenous taurine for maintaining their physiological functions. Nevertheless, taurine may be conditionally indispensable for fish and shrimp, depending on dietary protein source, fish species and size, feeding habits, previous histories and the rate of metabolism of its precursors, namely cysteine and methionine. It is my belief that taurine functions in, and benefits for, farmed fish and shrimp are now more than worthy of critical review and analysis. This review summarizes the current knowledge on the roles of taurine in fish, particularly farmed fish and shrimp, with emphasis on taurine structure and biosynthesis, physiological functions, the effects of dietary taurine on fish performance and health and live food enrichment with taurine.

Effects of Dietary Taurine on the Growth, Digestive Enzymes, and Antioxidant Capacity in Juvenile Sea Cucumber, Apostichopus japonicus

“…First, the growth rate of sea cucumbers in this study was low, so the beneficial effect of taurine on the growth of sea cucumbers was not expressed. Second, previous studies suggested that beneficial effects of taurine on the growth of aquatic animals were especially obvious during early life stages of these animals (El‐Sayed ). In this study, sea cucumbers were juveniles and the beneficial effects of taurine may be more obvious in the seedling stage of sea cucumbers.…”

“…Taurine (2‐aminoethanesulfonic acid) is an amino sulfonic acid, which has been proved to be conditionally essential for some aquatic animals when these animals are fed diets containing high plant protein levels, as taurine is deficient in plant‐based protein sources (El‐Sayed ). In aquatic vertebrates, numerous studies have confirmed that dietary taurine could promote growth of some marine finfish species (Gaylord et al ; Lunger et al ; Takagi et al ; Yun et al ; Jirsa et al ; Wang et al ) and soft‐shelled turtles (Hou et al ) when fishmeal was replaced with plant proteins in the diets.…”

Metabolic fingerprinting of gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) liver to track interactions between dietary factors and seasonal temperature variations

“…Comparatively, the experimental winter feed (WF) had a much higher proportion of marine-derived protein sources (45.8%), consequently lower level of plant-proteins and the totality of the oil fraction associated to fish oil and krill phospholipids. This WF diet was further supplemented with betaine as a phagostimulant (Kasumyan & Døving, 2003; Kolkovski, Arieli & Tandler, 1997), soy lecithin to facilitate fat emulsification during digestion and/or improve lipid clearance from the gut (Koven et al, 1993; Koven et al, 1998; Tocher et al, 2008), vitamin C and vitamin E as antioxidants and non-essential amino acid taurine, given its role as antioxidant and involvement on bile acid conjugation (El-Sayed, 2013). The WF diet contained 50.6% crude protein, 19.7% crude fat, 22.4 kJ/g gross energy.…”

The effect of dietary protein source (fishmeal vs. plant protein) and non‐starch polysaccharide level on fat digestibility and faecal bile acid loss in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

“…On the contrary, averaged over NSP level, fat ADC was lowest for fish fed the FM diets. Many marine fish species have a low taurine synthesis capacity, creating a need for exogenous taurine, while exogenous taurine seems not required for many freshwater fish species (Divakaran, Ramanathan, & Ostrowski, 1992;El-Sayed, 2014). This result is not in line with the observation of Richard, Colen, and Aragao (2017) in Senegalese sole that fat ADC of a taurine-free PB diet significantly improved after taurine supplementation.…”