Dear @Neil Wang,

Thanks for an interesting and important question, one which was discussed a lot before and during the project, not least with the European Commission (EC). Therefore, I think I have to give you a fairly extensive answer.

The LIFECYCLE project plan was created to meet a call in the in the 7th Framework Programme, within the Work Programme called the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy. The specific call was KBBE-2007-1-2-16: Essential biological functions related to the most relevant stages of aquaculture fish life-history.

The opening sentence of the call text from the EC, outlining what was requested was: “This project will clarify the mechanisms of essential biological functions related to the most relevant stages of aquaculture fish life-history (larval development, growth, maturation, reproduction) at both a physiological and molecular level.”

Further, the expected impact was defined in the call text as: “The project will deliver improved competitiveness of the EU aquaculture industry by establishing the knowledge-base required for improved stress control, disease prevention and control, new breeding technologies, better environmental performance and diversification into new species.”

When I and others started to discuss how to establish a strong consortium to meet this call, it was clear to us that the EC was asking for a project which would significantly advance the state-of-the-art of fundamental science in areas of biology relevant to aquaculture. Thus, the EC specifically asked us to “clarify mechanisms…at both a physiological and molecular level”, and the project should be “establishing the knowledge-base required for…”.  On the other hand, there was no request that the project itself should translate the new, fundamental knowledge into aquaculture applications. We were convinced that the LIFECYCLE project should function as a “motor” and the EC would subsequently call for a string of more applied projects focusing on “improved stress control, disease prevention and control, new breeding technologies, better environmental performance and diversification into new species”, using the knowledge-base provided by LIFECYCLE. How this was handled by the EC is another story.

Based on this, the LIFECYCLE consortium members were selected based on their scientific excellence in research on physiological and molecular mechanisms of essential biological functions in fish. These were 12 major universities and research institutes. Only one SME partner was included in order to deliver larval material for fundamental research on metamorphosis.

Your question was about zebrafish. As the call text asked for clarifications of mechanisms at the molecular level, it was decided after some deliberation to include work on zebrafish and medaka, as these model species offered unique ways of studying molecular mechanisms. To date, I think about 15 papers have come out of LIFECYCLE on molecular mechanisms using zebrafish, mainly carried out by the groups of @Ian Johnston at University of St Andrews, @Rüdiger Schulz at the University of Utrecht, @Olivier Kah at the University of Rennes 1 and by various groups at INRA.  There researchers could perhaps, better than me, comment on how their findings have or could be translated into aquaculture applications.

I hope this answers your question, at least to a degree. I can just add that during the evaluation of the LIFECYCLE application, the scientific work-plan received a top score of 5.0, and the application received 14.5 out of maximally 15 in total score. The work plan included over 140 well-defined scientific deliverables, and with about 120 scientific papers already published, I think we have done quite well in delivering what we promised.  :-)

Dear Björn,

Thank you very much for this detailed answer. Congratulations to all the participants and to you for coordinating such an immense work.

Neil