Genome-edited salmon: a sustainable and socially acceptable solution to aquaculture?

The Norwegian Atlantic salmon farming industry is halted by challenges related to environmental impact and fish welfare. Some of the issues have been suggested solved by the use of novel genome editing technologies, such as CRISPR, which allows for targeted mutations and speeding up fish breeding. For successful introduction, applications of the technology need to be socially acceptable and contribute to sustainability. In this dissertation, I study the technological potential and challenges, the sustainability issues, and conditions for social acceptance of introducing CRISPR in salmon farming, in three papers, respectively. In paper I, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify and categorize publications that have used genome editing in aquaculture finfish species. The search was designed according to relevant PRISMA elements. Results shows that a wide variety of aquaculture species have been used, salmonids being the second most studied group, with a broad specter of potential for future application in aquaculture such as sterility, disease resistance and increased growth. Paper II and III are both based on a qualitative study of semi-structured stakeholder interviews and citizen focus group interviews. The interviews were conducted in video calls and included three main topics: the salmon as an animal, genome editing, and sustainability. For paper II, considerations and conditions related to aquaculture, sustainability and genome editing were identified and merged with data from an analysis of international and national policy and strategy documents, to inform a biosphere-based sustainability assessment framework. For paper III, general considerations, and conditions for social acceptance of genome-edited salmon were identified. Main finding where that across all interviews, considerations to the wild salmon viability and the farmed salmon welfare, are widely shared and seems to be of main concern to the study participants. Further, several conditions to the industry and products were raised, such as unintended consequences being unacceptable, and the editing must contribute to improve welfare above increasing profit. The papers show that there are potential applications of genome editing under research which might be considered socially acceptance and sustainable for salmon farming. However, this seem to depend on social acceptance to the salmon farming industry in general, and on genome editing being applied in concert with other measurements that improve salmon health and welfare, and that reduces environmental effects.