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Aquaculture contributes to the sustainable development of food security, marine resource conservation, and economy. Shifting aquaculture feed from fish meal and oil to terrestrial plant derivatives may result in cost savings. However, many carnivorous fish cannot be sustained on plant-derived materials, necessitating the need for the identification of important factors for farmed fish growth and the identification of whether components derived from terrestrial plants can be used in feed. Herein, we focused on the carnivorous fish leopard coral grouper (P. leopardus) to identify the essential growth factors and clarify their intake timing from feeds. Furthermore, we evaluated the functionality of starch, which are easily produced by terrestrial plants. Results reveal that carbohydrates, which are not considered essential for carnivorous fish, can be introduced as a major part of an artificial diet. The development of artificial feed using starch offers the possibility of increasing the growth of carnivorous fish in aquaculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional proton nuclear magnetic resonance ( 1 H-NMR) has been widely used for identification and quantification of small molecular components in food. However, identification of major soluble macromolecular components from conventional 1 H-NMR spectra is difficult. This is because the baseline appearance is masked by the dense and high-intensity signals from small molecular components present in the sample mixtures. In this study, we introduced an integrated analytical strategy based on the combination of additional measurement using a diffusion filter, covariation peak separation, and matrix decomposition in a small-scale training dataset. This strategy is aimed to extract signal profiles of soluble macromolecular components from conventional 1 H-NMR spectral data in a large-scale dataset without the requirement of re-measurement. We applied this method to the conventional 1 H-NMR spectra of water-soluble fish muscle extracts and investigated the distribution characteristics of fish diversity and muscle soluble macromolecular components, such as lipids and collagens. We identified a cluster of fish species with low content of lipids and high content of collagens in muscle, which showed great potential for the development of functional foods. Because this mechanical data processing method requires additional measurement of only a small-scale training dataset without special sample pretreatment, it should be immediately applicable to extract macromolecular signals from accumulated conventional 1 H-NMR databases of other complex gelatinous mixtures in foods.