Nutraceutical values of fish demand their ecological genetic studies: a short review

Background: Fish act as an affordable source of animal protein as well as the source for many other substances of nutraceutical importance. Under rapid biomagnification of pollutants, low tolerance to climatic stressors increase susceptibility of various fish to large-scale mortality. Therefore, understanding the magnitude and type of their responses to individual or multiple climatic factors/stressors may help to conserve the genome of threatened organisms of pharmaceutical or nutraceutical importances such as fish. The study of the broad range of genetic material under varied climatic conditions, i.e., ecogenomics, such as nucleotide sequences of DNA and RNA that is present in the same fish species under particular environmental condition due to climatic changes seems to be important for their management. Aim: The aim of this study was to gather information about nutraceutical values, ecogenomics data, and issues related to handling ecogenomics data and to identify limitations to study influences of climatic changes that may lead to design appropriate conservation strategies, despite existence of multiple constraints for conservation implications against climate change adaptations. Method: Related literature in PubMed and other electronic database were analyzed for this study. As per the requirement, the numbers of articles found on a particular terminology such as “fish,” “ecogenomics,” and “ecogenomics in fish,” in PubMed were only included. Results: It was observed that despite high nutritional and nutraceutical values of fish, study on their ecogenomics is very limited. Rate of climate change, restraints to climate change adaptation, several limitations to migration, constraints to in situ adaptation, connectedness of populations and level of gene flow, and capacity of plasticity for adaptation are many of the constraints that lead to changes in fish physiology, but the effects of such constraints on genomic instability in fish are scantily studied. On the other hand, a huge amount of generated ecogenomic data on other organisms create challenges for annotation of protein and gene sequences. However, the challenges are now gradually becoming achievable to counter the ecogenomic issues. Conclusion: Emphasis must be given to study on ecogenomics changes in fish and other aquatic organisms. Conserving germplasm of endangered and threatened fish species, and delivering genetically resistant fish variety, seem to be essential for effective management actions under climatic altered states. It will assist adaptation of fish having nutraceutical values in the face of current and future climate changes and chemical pollution in environments particularly in aquatic ecosystems.