Check out this new paper published as an output of the Group on Insect Nutrition To Open Nutritional Innovative Challenges (GIN-TONIC) Cost Action! Jordan contributed to this alongside an incredible team of researchers spanning 15 institutions and 12 countries, and it’s now published in Journal of Insects as Food and Feed!
The mass rearing of insects for food and feed has emerged as a promising solution to food insecurity, protein production and waste valorisation. While outcomes such as growth and feed conversion efficiency have been examined for mass reared insects, the mechanisms underpinning these outcomes are poorly understood.
To optimise the rearing of insects for food and feed and build towards efficient, scalable and productive systems, we must first therefore understand the mechanisms driving productivity and efficiency in common target species. By integrating emerging technologies across disciplines, we can begin to characterise these mechanisms to guide the optimisation of robust and standardised systems for efficient and scalable food and feed production.
This article explores opportunities for integrated and interdisciplinary thinking, and the use of emerging technologies to characterise the feeding physiology, digestive processes, microbiome-driven nutritional effects and behavioural regulation of insects commonly used for food and feed. The article identifies areas of synergy and interaction across research domains and provides a roadmap and call to action to catalyse uptake of these ideas across research and practice.
By realising interdisciplinary integration and implementation of emerging technologies, the article postulates that an urgently required deeper mechanistic understanding of feeding-related processes is possible. This can, in turn, enable precision nutrition, improve system robustness and ensure consistent product quality.
This was a great collaborative experience with a brilliant team of researchers across the GIN-TONIC consortium, and hopefully the start of many more to come!
Check out the full paper for all of the details:
Knowledge gaps in feeding physiology, microbiome and behaviour of insects for food and feed: overcoming barriers to advancing insect-rearing through interdisciplinarity, standardisation, and emerging technologies
Foraging Ecology Research Group 