Healthy water is essential for pathogen management, sustainable farming, and good yields. Underlying all stock and water health is the aquatic microbiome. Unfortunately, the very process used to treat water and reduce pathogen loads is also stripping out the very microorganisms needed for healthy systems. When this complex microbial system falls out of balance, pathogens proliferate along with a host of related problems.

Many fish and shrimp farmers re-seed with probiotics, but typical blends are low quality, don’t have a complete profile of beneficial bacteria needed for optimum function, or contain filler substances, and therefore provide very little benefit. Biofilters also provide critical services in water health by oxidizing ammonia and nitrites, however, ‘biofilter bugs’ are notoriously hard to propagate in a system and even harder to diagnose when problems occur.

Luminis’ Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) workflows have recently been expanded to shed light on this important faction of water health: the beneficial bacteria. Fish and shrimp farmers can now test their water and get a complete list of all the probiotic or ‘biofilter’ species present along with abundances, which gives direct feedback on which probiotics and biofilters are working and which ones are not, saving both time and resources.

“Next Gen microbiome investigation services support efforts to optimize inputs and test product efficacy, which leads to reduced operating expenses. Linked with our proprietary bioinformatics pipeline and database, fish and shrimp farmers will have access to comprehensive reports along with detailed breakdowns of both bacteria and Archaea,” the company said.

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